Halen. No Doubt experiments with several new styles on the album. "Ex-Girlfriend", which originally featured a Prince-style funk sound, was rewritten and includes rapped vocals over piano and flamenco guitar parts. After opening with Gabrial McNair's jazz funeral horn part over Young's beatboxing, "Bathwater" proceeds into a song written in swing time. It was described as a combination of the band's 2 Tone roots with the operatic slapstick of Gilbert and Sullivan. "Marry Me" features use of the tabla, a pair of tuned hand drums prominent in India. Young and bassist Tony Kanal's contributions were compared to the rhythm of nu metal music, and the fragmented progression of "Comforting Lie" was likened to the work of Korn. The album's lyrics depict Stefani's maturation and femininity, reflected by images of oral contraceptives, a wedding cake and makeup on the album cover, as well as her romantic relationship with Rossdale. Her lyrics drew comparisons to the bitter, confessional styling of Hole frontwoman Courtney Love. "New" was written while the band was touring about the excitement of meeting Rossdale and her infatuation with him. Later compositions, however, discuss the problems that the two had maintaining a long-distance relationship. "Ex-Girlfriend" discusses a failing relationship, and "Suspension Without Suspense" and "Home Now" detail feelings of resentment, loneliness, and indecision. On "Simple Kind of Life", she confesses to hoping for a mistake with her birth control and a desire to leaving music for a domestic life. She contrasts this, however, with her need for independence: Critical reception Return of Saturn received generally positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 68, based on 16 reviews. Entertainment Weeklys David Browne characterized the album as filled with "smoother, layered mid-tempo ballads as creamily textured as extra-thick napoleon pastries", but stated that Stefani's lyrics were too much of a throwback to the alternative rock scene of the early 1990s and contrasted with the boom of teen pop. Robert Christgau, writing for The Village Voice, described the emotions Stefani expressed as shallow, and the NME stated that her preoccupation with Rossdale was distracting and weakened the intense, Madonna-like character she had established on Tragic Kingdom. AllMusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine, however, called it "a terrific, layered record that exceeds any expectations set by Tragic Kingdom". Barry Walters from Rolling Stone referred