“Mr. Marks … constructed his score as a mostly continuous sequence of cheerily seductive original pop tunes with simple, repetitive lyrics, interspersed with a handful of familiar hymns and gospel songs.
Saturated with sampled timbres and driven by sputtering hip-hop break beats, Mr. Marks’s music is bright and sentimental, at times even cloying in a manner meant to evoke anodyne commercial Christian pop. But Mr. Marks’s crafty juxtapositions, clashes and transformations add to the opera’s overall sense of ambiguity; in moments when he underscores sexual urges scarcely hidden within his squeaky-clean borrowed sources, substantial heat results.
…
the work’s mix of catchy tunes and unsettling themes nonetheless makes for a consistently affecting evening of theater.” – Steve Smith
“In the extraordinarily witty new miniopera The Little Death: Vol. 1, the electropop maestro Matt Marks and his fellow performer Mellissa Hughes play Boy and Girl, two kids in love facing the nookie-versus-chastity debate.
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unabashedly boppy, baroquely multireferential, then suddenly sentimental” – Helen Shaw
“The Little Death, Vol. 1 is catchy, conceptual and rambunctious–so call it whatever you like. Either way, the baseline “story” here (such as it is), involves two characters named Boy and Girl, who are having trouble balancing the carnal with the godly. Over the course of 11 songs, they push and pull against each other, their respective desires and philosophies, and–as singers–the genre divides between Christian Pop, old-school hymns and frantic electro.” – Seth Colter Walls