wrote the blueprint for 's hard-rocking , and essentially follows the pattern, for both better and worse. A lighter affair than , is actually a stranger album than its predecessor, buoyed by bizarre - flourishes from pianist and a handful of winding, vaguely experimental songs. abandons his futuristic obsessions to concentrate on the detached cool of New York and London hipsters, as on the compressed rockers and follows the hard stuff with the jazzy, dissonant sprawls of all of which manage to be both campy and avant-garde simultaneously, while the sweepingly cinematic is a soaring fusion of sci-fi and melodramatic teenage . He lets his paranoia slip through in the clenched rhythms of as well as on his oddly clueless cover of For all the pleasures on , there's no distinctive sound or theme to make the album cohesive; it's riding the wake of , which means there's a wealth of classic material here, but not enough focus to make the album itself a classic. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine