Caleb Nichols‘ 2022 tuneful and sweet-natured solo debut, Ramon, was an Abbey Road-derived pop-rock operetta that imagined how it was precisely that Mr. Mustard became so mean. “Ramon Mustard”, Nichols decided, got his heart broken by a sailor named Jerome Custard: after the two fell in love, Captain Custard began to worry about homophobic backlash and soon sailed away, leaving young Ramon bereft and, as he aged, bitter as mustard. Although explicitly a Beatles homage, the album’s sound and mood were strongly guided by Elliott Smith, whose tenderness and pathos deepened Nichols’ case for Mr. Mustard as a “queer icon”, to quote Nichols’s ambitious narrative concept. [...] the first song on Nichols’ new album, Let’s Look Back, leaps out of the gate with edgy electric guitar, New Wave toughness, snarly vocals, and defiant lyrics that might put you in mind of early Elvis Costello. Nichols serves immediate notice that he’s got more in his musical bag and emotional spectrum than Ramon contained. [...] “Absolute Boy” is Let’s Look Back’s heart and mind, and at nearly five minutes, its longest track. It’s a simple but eminently hummable tune, anchored in the 1980s (primarily The Cure, it seems), with a winning guitar intro, a sunny melody, and a singalong chorus—except that the lyrics are painful to sing: “Before you hit me / Before you clipped my wings / I was the absolute boy.” — Adam Sobsey, Pop Matters