Entertainment Weekly - "...On album No. 2, this singerless Maryland trio hybridizes better than most, eschewing the Muzak-y conventions that have already taken over trip-hop and replacing them with a blend of Wire-esque jaggedness, arena-rock machismo, and the occasional dance-friendly beat." - Rating: B+
Alternative Press - 5 (out of 5) - "...Trans Am are the only band smearing the lines between heady cerebralists, dance-club denizens and grain-alcohol-puking lamebrains..."
Musician - "...America's answer to all that Krautrock stuff...Integrating the sublime circular cadences of Neu! with the humorous logic of Kraftwerk, Trans Am fire up like a warped prog band with a tape loop fetish....Futuristic soundtracks for a wrecked transistor era."
Rovi
Trans Am prove in one mildly amusing, backward-turned sitting that much of what defines "post-rock" sounds suspiciously like rock's longtime nemesis, the late-'70s pre-techno Euro-pop of Kraftwerk and New Order. With much of this record a simple meditation on the latter, Surrender to the Night is surprisingly slim on new ideas, sounding for the most part either like a self-defacing gambit or an updater course for those who missed it the first time around. The group is at its best when they stumble onto the occasional square foot of new territory (as on "Cologne," "Tough Love," and the title cut, all of which wed live, more immediately rock-based instrumentation with electro-funk rhythms and synth figures), but much of Surrender lays on familiar, by now somewhat fallow soil. ~ Sean Cooper|
Rovi