After credibly reinventing themselves with the previous year's "Nomadness," this album sent the band into a downward spiral...attempting to mainstream their sound. Not every song does so, though: "Beside the Rio Grande" revives the epic sound and moral outrage of "Grave New World" in its tale of a frontier minister's grisly religious martyrdom, and the pleasant strumming of "Thinking of You" soft-shoes its way through a music-hall love song... ~ Paul Collins