S. Alexander Reed

“Linnell: 'Some records that come out today only have ten songs, or less.'

Flansburgh: 'This makes us angry.'

Linnell: 'But instead of cursing the darkness, John and I have decided to do something about it. We've put out a record with nineteen songs on it.'

Flansburgh: 'And that's why our record is better.'

Behind this jokes lurks a telling possibility. If nonsense, variability, and excess are the hallmarks of 'cornucopia,' then the songwriting practices of clarity, focus, and restraint are the stuff of famine - certainly boring, and quite possibly stupid.”
― S. Alexander Reed, Flood

“Müller’s poem concerns an old street musician who, as a wraith of the beleaguered narrator’s bleak future, forever plays the same tune alone at the edge of a village, undying in an unchanging winter. In the context of Müller and Schubert’s full cycle, “Der Leiermann” occupies the crushing moment at which death itself is revealed to be an insufficient escape from the narrator’s terrible disillusionment, and where he instead resigns to fade into a numb, undreaming circularity. Both Schubert’s and Covenant’s settings of the poem are appropriately spare in their melody, but the harmony, rhythm, and timbral palette in Covenant’s recording mismatches the stagnation in the text awkwardly.”
― S. Alexander Reed, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music