from Monkeybiz.ca by James Tennant: 2007-01-15

Rob Crow - Living Well

Rob Crow looks like your Average Joe (even if, on the cover of Living Well, that joe is wearing a Church of Satan T-shirt). By looking at him, you’d never know he was an indie rock workhorse with more than a handful of other bands – most notably Pinback – and that he plays most of the instruments on his solo records by himself. Living Well is more like Pinback than some of his other, more off-kilter solo material, and the songs are all crafted with the same under-the-radar pop sensibility - more subtle than Sloan, less fractured than Robert Pollard (and more indie rock than fellow Californian Yuji Oniki, whose songwriting is not unlike Crow’s).

Crow’s low key approach means that there isn’t too much to delineate the songs, especially after the half-way mark, but they’re each so good unto themselves that you don’t mind too much. Pinback fans won’t find a Pinback album here, but they’ll find enough elements in common that it won’t matter.