★★★★★
November 4, 2013
Trent Reznor has cited Gary Numan's alienated Eighties synth pop as a major influence, and Numan credits a NIN show with inspiring his creative rebirth. Reznor is absent on this comeback LP, though Robin Finck, guitarist and longtime NIN collaborator, figures prominently in the sound, a searing digital-industrial display brightened by Numan's slightly cracked choirboy high tenor...
- www.rollingstone.com
2013-11-05
★★★★★
Now veritably re-contextualized by the coming of the technological alienation his early lyrics foreshadowed, Gary Numan's new album seethes with tension and paranoia ("Here in the black/It comes for me," he shudders). His incisive expositions on contemporary bemusement and anxiety are made all the more unsettling by their heaving, metal-machine accompaniment...
- filtermagazine.com
2013-10-23
★★★★★
For a long time, Gary Numan's music career has felt like some kind of bizarre accident. The man who is often dubbed the "godfather of electro" was originally signed as frontman of a supposed punk band, Tubeway Army; he only discovered synthesizers because a Minimoog was left in the studio. His first major hit 'Are Friends Electric...
- thequietus.com
2013-10-18
★★★★★
Gary Numan takes real issue with nostalgia. As a pioneer in both electro and industrial music, Numan has made an entire career out of looking forward. It was his reason for exploring electronic music in the first place, and it continues to be a driving force for him today. As someone who honestly believes that "you're only as good as your next album or your last album," with Splinter (Songs From a Broken Mind), Numan is poised to rise to a level that rivals his biggest successes with his...
- consequenceofsound.net
2013-10-18
★★★★★
An inspiration to decades of kohl-eyed youths using synthesizers as a force for misery, Gary Numan's been in the shadows for some time now, delighting diehard Numanoids and few others. His 20th album finds the 55-year-old in a kind of feedback loop, sounding more like the bands he's influenced - Depeche Mode's doomy electronica, say, or the goth-industrial of Nine Inch Nails - than his pioneering singles of the late '70s...
- www.nme.com
2013-10-16
★★★★★
For a man with nearly 40 years in the game, Gary Numan still holds an impressive amount of sway. Starting out as a pioneering figure of electronic music in the '70s, the U.S.-based Londoner has straddled each decade since with a vigour that's ensured his legacy remains largely untarnished, despite the occasional clanger. And the perennial swathes of praise from today's hip young things further feed his iconic status...
- www.undertheradarmag.com
2013-10-16
★★★★★
THE WILDERNESS YEARS HAVE not withered Gary Numan. Unable to even get arrested during the late '80s/early '90s, the electronic maven reconfigured his whole sound, importing a darker industrial edge that owed much to Nine Inch Nails while traversing godless, schlock-free lyrical terrain. Splinter ... arrives after a move to Los Angeles, but there's no sudden new sunny disposition, just an artist on rare form...
- www.mojo4music.com
2013-10-16
★★★★★
There's a hermetic quality to Gary Numan's latest album: it gazes inwards with such intensity you wonder if he's addressing anyone but himself. You'd say he it made for his own pleasure, except that this is the sound of emotional pain. Numan has talked candidly about the depression, mid-life crisis, and struggle of becoming a parent, that he experienced while writing these songs; for him, they were a form of therapy, but for the listener they're harder work...
- www.theguardian.com
2013-10-11
★★★★★
When Krafterk became musical deities in the early 80s, they shut up shop and spent decades burnishing their legendary status. Gary Numan's elevation to the electro-pop sainthood saw him take a different approach, ramping up his production without losing a grip on quality control. 2011's Dead Son Rising was a gleeful patchwork of analogue electronica and the guitar crunch of his Tubeway Army days.
- recordcollectormag.com
2013-10-10