Beauty & Ruin

On Beauty & Ruin, Mould’s guitar-pop is sturdy and stirring enough to take on heavier and more poignant resonances, covering a broad range of tones and themes that reflect a gamut of feelings and experience that could only be accrued by living through a lot.

On Beauty & Ruin, second chances aren’t taken for granted--they’re embraced with unfettered ferocity and humble grace.

It charts its course with verve and accessibility, offering a masterclass in powerfully economic guitar rock. [Jul 2014, p.97]

Beauty & Ruin is Bob Mould’s catchiest, most tuneful album since Copper Blue, full of ear-wormy melodies and bouncy hooks.

The punk legend's 11th solo album eschews his dabbles in electronic music for a career-spanning sound that nods and winks in the most unsubtle of manners at his history. [7 Jun 2014, p.54]

This self-aware mortality is the trump card of Beauty & Ruin, as Mould neither denies his youth nor his age; as he explores his pain, he finds emotional and musical narrative to tie his past to his present and the results are powerful.

He’s definitely reflecting: these 12 songs parse grief and loss, and begin to consider the idea of mortality in a way Mould never has before.

It’s done in quite a straightforward and simplistic way, which Mould has acknowledged himself. Nevertheless, it’s very effective and poignant.

Score yet another triumph for a man whose legend continues to grow. [Jul 2014, p.98]

Beauty & Ruin falls short as a masterpiece but it quietly lets the handbrake off on Mould's creativity. [Jul 2014, p.79]

Beauty & Ruin might be the most realized example of the Mouldian aesthetic, and combined with the heartfelt poignancy of the subject matter--the aging rocker acknowledging his years earned and the years left at the wheel--it soars to contention with the rest of Mould’s formidable oeuvre.

Nothing on Beauty & Ruin truly resembles experimentation, as Mould, unburdened of so much baggage of late, seems joyously unconcerned with proving anything to anyone other than the fact that he can still craft hook after hook.

While Beauty & Ruin contains some of the most vital music of Mould's solo career, it'd be great to see him properly stretched again as an artist and player. And maybe that requires an even bigger rapprochement with the past.

Beauty & Ruin is more impressionistic than, say, the Mountain Goats' Sunset Tree, but it's still a vivid, moving story about dealing with abuse.

As the alt rock veteran approaches 30 years in the rock spotlight, Mould shows no signs of pumping the brakes on his creativity.

Even in Mould’s volume-crazy Hüsker Dü and Sugar days, his songs breathed; on Beauty & Ruin, they just exhale.

Backed by bassist Jason Narducy and Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster, Mould rips through 12 bristling guitar-pop tracks that, at their propulsive and tuneful best (the Sugar-y "I Don't Know You Anymore," the Hüskers-worthy "Kid With Crooked Face"), recall the classic eras of his much-loved former bands.

Aside from his forays into electronic music, Mould is dabbling a little bit here in the sounds found throughout his career. Many of Beauty & Ruin’s tracks have a poppy tinge that’s more reminiscent of Mould’s 1990s band Sugar.

It is not all perfect. Here and there, Mould switches onto autopilot and ends up filling up dead space in songs with half-arsed, Foo Fighters-ish powerchord passages, and the less said about the awful AOR dud “Let the Beauty Be” the better, But these moments are few and far between, with the bulk of the album consisting of straightforward, accomplished rock songs with enough muscle to anchor their poppy choruses and prevent them from floating off into Green Day territory.