Ok, they did it twice in one year. A good band managed to put out two of their best albums in a single year without really farting over any songs. Yet again Art managed to avoid bitching about his dad over and over again like he'd done in the albums previous to 2000, but he still have the anguished person thing going for him.
One rather large improvement is that he stops blabbing on about himself to talk about others a bit more on this album. He's really improved and gotten a lot of the anguish out of his system in favor of different topics for songs.
The downside to this album is that since he's gotten all that anguish out he's not playing to his full potential like he was in songs like Santa Monica and Heroin Girl. He needs to get back in that nice little area between hating the world so much that the lyrics suck and liking the world enough that's he's not giving his all.
Overall, a damn fine album.