Funny that the much-touted "reunion/comeback" album followed by just three years, while it took five years to turn out its sequel, -- a time frame that seems much more appropriate for a "comeback." To pile on the irony, feels more like a return to form than its predecessor, even if it's every bit as calculated and has flown the coup. With , a neo-classic producer who always attempts to reclaim his artist's original claim to greatness, helming the boards with , strip their sound back to its spare, hard-rocking basics. act in kind, turning out a set of songs that are pretty traditionalist. There are no new twists or turns in either the rockers or (apart maybe from the quiet menace of later used to great effect on ), even if they revive some of the English and acoustic that was on . Still, this approach works because they are turning out songs that may not be classics but are first-rate examples of the value of craft. If this was released ten years, even five years earlier, this would be a near-triumph of classicist , but since came out in the CD age, it's padded out to 15 tracks, five of which could have been chopped to make the album much stronger. Instead, it runs on for nearly an hour, an ironically bloated length for an album whose greatest strengths are its lean, concentrated classic sound and songcraft. Still, it makes for a stronger record than its predecessor. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine