Excerpt: "<em>Now We’re Active</em> is both a testament to the band's faith in their own work and a smartly  crafted collection of guitar songs which, while it won’t win any awards  for groundbreaking artistic imagination or surreally inspired  experimentalism, is probably exactly what you might want to listen to  when driving from the band's Australian hometown of Perth to anywhere  else on the map... Umpire reveal themselves as a  band whose imaginations are very far from limited by their mastery of  the soft rock format they introduce themselves with... <em>Now We’re Active</em> is an album which reveals a band whose  imaginations are now finally within their own grasp as musicians.  Alternately full on, grandiose and brilliantly inventive, Umpire have  very nearly made a prog rock masterpiece, and I say nearly only because  their more ambitious ideas are continuing to develop. That journey from  Perth to Melbourne won’t seem quite so long with this on the car stereo."

<a href="http://www.adequacy.net/2011/06/umpire-now-were-active/" target="_blank">DOA</a>