“This is music of the American West, wholly original in ways not unlike that of Captain Beefheart, Harry Partch, or Shuggie Otis. You know, an instinctive originality, unhindered by cultural or aesthetic archetype, just blessed with some kind of really strong radar...It's like hearing the truth, unvarnished, for the first time, and feeling shocked, like you're experiencing the taste of an apple after subsisting on PopTarts your whole previous life. This is music by smart people, musically gifted ones too (important), who don’t fit a niche, seem not to care about fitting a niche, most likely couldn’t fit a niche if they tried . Anthony is... apparently a musician on a genuinely individual path -- a. cranky and sardonic and stubbornly nostalgic path it is, too. What is happening here is the sound of a composer devising his own symmetry; in the structures of the songs, in the deceptively willy-nilly subject matter of the lyrics and their chill juxtapositions with instrumental timbres and chord progressions -- and really just the way he follows his muse. Weary, cynical and sad, too...but which comes off bracing, exhilarating, even.”
- John Payne LA Weekly/Bluefat
“Stoney Spring kick all the grimness out of dystopic anarchy with their roadhouse musicianship and fuck-it-all humor. Alex Chilton might've made an album like this if he'd lived longer and sung lower. Such idiosyncratic spontaneity hasn't been permitted since the days of Syd Barrett, Captain Beefheart and the Fugs.”
- Greg Burk, LA Weekly, LA Times, MetalJazz.com
“Stoney Spring simply defies everyday descriptions. It's rare to find such well-established musicians daring to defy the norm, but with Stoney Spring, they've done just that, and the results are as creative as they are compelling.”
- Lee Zimmerman, No Depression
“Without exception the songs on Natural Sweetness display an exquisitely loose tightness... a kind of stylistic harmony that threads together disparates as easily as tying one’s shoes, all of it with an intuitive wit that defies easy categorization... While it may indeed be grounded historically in West Coast pop experimentalism, the music on offer here generally slips free of even those roots, often via sly existential lyrical contortions that match their craft and bent-but-impeccable logic the structures they inhabit. “Revisiting the Past” is an especially vivid example, ripe, rife, elliptical and mystical, it’s a tour-de-force that overwhelms with flagrant subtleties... a massively accomplished record.”
- Dave Cantrell, Stereo Embers
“Stoney Spring exists in a dreamscape of experimentation.... an audio kaleidoscope, the colors become sound, the palette the diverse instrumentation found in the mind of Stoney Spring songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Anthony Lacques."
- Danny McClosky, The Alternate Root
“Stoney Spring understands the essentially desperate times we face. Yet, despair is not the essence of their music. Instead, one finds a joyful challenge to the ever expanding matrix. Political without the abrasiveness so often associated with that term, insightful without being preachy, and most importantly, enjoyable.”
- Ron Jacobs, Counterpunch
“At the intersection of freak-folk and horticulture resides a tidy little masterpiece of an album, Right on Heliotrope! by Stoney Spring... It's the kind of take-no-prisoners scathing social commentary that one is used to hearing in one of Kanye West's many rants, but not usually from an under-the-radar folk artist in this current musical climate… This is the only album to come along in a long time that smells as good as it sounds.
For those who still believe in the communal spirit of making and sharing music, and who enjoy expanding their mind and thinking about the world in unconventional ways, the music of Stoney Spring should forever find a home at the top of your stack of albums.”
- Leks Maltby, Aside/Beside