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Allmusic
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Q
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The A.V. Club	B
Tiny Mix Tapes

Native Speaker is the debut studio album by the Canadian experimental pop/art rock band Braids, released by Flemish Eye/Kanine Records on January 18, 2011 (April 11 in the UK) to critical acclaim.

The band started working on Native Speaker in Montreal in September 2009. The recording of the album was completed during the winter of 2010. After negotiating with labels in the United States and Canada, Braids announced Chad Vangaalen's label Flemish Eye would distribute Native Speaker in Canada and Kanine Records would release the album in the United States. According to the band's Q interview, it cost less than $500 to make. "We just had to rent drum mics and cover the mastering. I guess we only have to sell about 100 copies to break even!", Raphaelle Standell-Preston remarked.

The album was self-produced, although not due to its low budget. "It was primarily for creative control. None of us had recorded before so it took a really long time to get it right - about nine months", the singer explained.

The big thing for us was being sure of when we'd reached excellence, knowing which of the 400 guitar takes or vocal tracks was the perfect one. I was in tears at points because I felt I was falling short of perfection. We really overworked ourselves. - Raphaelle Standell-Preston, Q interview

Standell-Preston, the chief lyricist, said the album describes "the changes in her life from Calgary schoolgirl to Montreal musician, and the discovery of sexuality and relationships along the way". She also remarked in 2013 that "everything besides the title track is so angry. I was so upset and felt like the world was really unfair".

The band’s way of mixing pop and avant-garde music met with much critical acclaim. "Braids' uniquely feminine experimental pop is largely a success", argued Allmusic, mentioning Animal Collective, Björk, Karen O, Cocteau Twins, Siouxsie Sioux, and Yeasayer as possible influences. According to Spin, the album "pairs glimmering, pastoral post-rock with foul-mouthed lyrics", making this girl's psyche preparation a fascinating thing to watch. "This is a band that is all about abstraction, experimentation and, most important, obfuscation", a Prefix reviewer remarked. Ian Cohen of Pitchfork noted the peculiarity of the quartet's brand of dream pop, saying, "There are dreams, there are nightmares, and then there are those night visions that don't quite qualify as either, the unnerving images and dialogues that rattle about your head in your waking life for the rest of the day and reveal strange, forgotten details every time you pick at them. That's the kind of stuff we need to be talking about if we're going to call Braids 'dream-pop' as so many others have".

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Wikipedia