negative in the Los Angeles Times, disparaging the musical retread of past works and the lack of force and spirit in the songs that drove his previous works. He further condemned the singing as lacking "customary driven edge" and the production as "provides a flat sound", concluding: "The man who brilliantly dissected life in terms of "Armed Forces" appears to have declared neutrality. It doesn't suit him, and the sooner he rejoins the fray the better." At the end of the year, NME named Punch the Clock the best album of 1983. In The Village Voices annual Pazz & Jop critics' poll for the year's best albums, Punch the Clock finished at number 11. Legacy Costello was initially disappointed with Punch the Clock. He bemoaned its "lack of heart", "misplaced arrangements" and felt it disregarded longevity: "A lot of the planning, the imaginary production of the record relates to pop music of the moment." Later on, he lambasted the "passionless fads of that charmless time: the early '80s." In December 1983, he began writing songs for a follow-up album, attempting to put "more craft and focus" into the tunes which he believed Punch the Clock lacked. The record's commercial success, however, enabled Costello to invite Langer and Winstanley back to produce, although relations between the songwriter and the Attractions were at a low point due to feeling sidelined by the TKO Horns and backing singers during the US and UK tours. The resulting album, Goodbye Cruel World, Costello hated and is regarded by biographers as the artist's low point. Retrospective appraisal Punch the Clock has received mixed reviews in later decades. Writing in 1991, Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune considered the album "a partially successful stab at mainstream success", while Entertainment Weekly Armond White simply wrote: "Work was never more fun, never better sung." Writing for Blender magazine in 2005, Douglas Wolk deemed the record a "not-entirely successful attempt to score pop hits", but saw "a whimsy and effervescence" that rarely appears in the artist's other works. In a retrospective write-up, Trouser Press called the album "another tour de force", while Lee Zimmerman of Goldmine wrote that it includes some of Costello's best songs of the era and some of his most successful. More unfavourably, Erlewine deemed Punch the Clock the artist's "least consistent set of original songs" up to that point, finding most of the material falls short