Los Angeles Times similarly noted that the lyrics present "a terrifying emotional landscape, closer to Kathy Acker novels than to anything you might think of as pop" and praised Love's vocals as "astonishingly expressive" and ranging from "howling rage to the sort of sardonic sneer associated with the Fall’s Mark Smith... Whether it wanted one or not, the decade finally has an equivalent of Patti Smith’s Horses. Play it loud. Pretty on the Inside is about as pretty as a flayed wound." Gold later commented: "If Pretty on the Inside were a horror movie, it would be all the parts that you have to look at through your fingers." LA Weeklys Lorraine Ali echoed a similar sentiment about the album's harsh nature, describing it as a "slithering nest of ugly thoughts and horrific admissions too intriguing to pass up." Spins Daisy von Furth noted a lyrical preoccupation with "the repulsive aspects of L.A.— superficiality, sexism, violence, and drugs. Love is the embodiment of what drives the band: the dichotomy of pretty/ugly ... The pretty/ugly dynamic also comes across in Hole's music ... a song like "Teenage Whore" at first comes across like a ranting noisy rage, but underneath is a surprisingly lush melody." Spin ranked it among the 20 best albums of the year in December 1991. Melody Maker columnist Sharon O'Connell wrote that the album was "the very best bit of fucked up rock 'n' roll [I've heard] all year," while Deborah Frost of The Village Voice called it "genre-defying", taking note of Love's reputation on the album as "the girl who won't shut up ... She is all the things that she should not be, and she shoves it, raw, right in your face." Hannah Levin of the Seattle publication The Stranger praised the album's production by Gordon and Fleming, stating that "despite Pretty on the Insides reputation as an unhinged, raw-sounding debut, a great deal of professional calculation went into putting this record together." They also applauded Love's lyrics, writing that the album "judiciously toes the line between the evasively obtuse and overtly obscene". In a 1994 article, Rolling Stone journalist David Fricke called the album "gloriously assaultive" and "a classic of sex-mad self-laceration, hypershred guitars and full-moon bawling ... in particular the spectacular goring of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides, Now" (aka "Clouds") at the end of the record. You don't really know the solitary despair at