Let's hear it for emotional martyrs in rock. This Washington, DC outfit should be just another group with vast reserves of useless melancholy, using their guitars to cope with mid-20s neurosis while the rest of us suffer. But what they actually are is a breath of fresh air, with a string section that creates a purposely messy avant-garde side as well as beautiful melodies. Definitely smart people. Pretty crazy too.
--- New Music Express (UK)

This quintet, which features a pair of guitarists and a cellist has a pretty strong grip on using dynamics and shifting arrangements to keep their odd musical notions moving forward. Pere Ubu-like, the band often uses restraint rather than bombast to make their unconventional tunes kick to life. It works particularly well when SWC's mordant sense of humor turns up on tracks like "Garden Variety Hate Song" and the masterful put-down "I Liked You Better When You Were Sick." An excellent lo-fi bonus is the disc's inclusion of The Royal We EP, which sports some nice, experimental four-track work.
--- Option (Los Angeles, CA)

Nodding to such divergent influences as American Music Club, XTC and Pere Ubu, as well as the more-familiar Fugazi, the band cranks out a dozen tunes that drip with the piss and Balsamic you've come to expect from Dischord. Thank God for art schools as catalysts for bands like Smart Went Crazy.
--- Magnet (Philadelphia, PA)

Melody after melody is taut with the finely intersticed musical and lyrical punctuation that puts SWC somewhere between the Beatles, Lewis Carroll, Guided By Voices and American Music Club. There is nothing as sweet as their bitterness or as bitingly bitter as their sweetness.
--- CAKE (Minneapolis, MN)

Among Dischord bands, Rites Of Spring was one of the most successful at expressing feelings with honesty and abandon while incorporating musical innovation, and Smart Went Crazy approaches its music in a similar fashion. The lyrics are pointed and poetic, while the music, thanks to Hilary Soldati's cello, is angular, subtle and dark. Artfully crafted, irony drenched-songs.
--- Washington City Paper (Washington, DC)

Smart Went Crazy's clever, jittery songs lean closer to the nervous pop of XTC's earliest albums than the dry muso tactics of many of their Dischord peers. Angular, dissonant guitar lines resolve into abrasively catchy hooks, over which are placed cool, ingenious keyboards, Hilary Soldati's sweet/sour cello, and singer Chad Clark's sighing, sneering voice and barbed lyrics. Clark does have a real knack for wise-ass lyrical twists, and when he aims at a target, the malice is entertaining. And coupled with the band's fierce melodic and arranging skills, some strong if rather heartless songs ensue.
--- Puncture (Portland, OR)

Filigreed with cello scraping, pungent dissonance and a crooked lyricism SWC's tunes twist timeworn pop formulas into knotty, sometimes novel shapes.
--- Chicago Tribune (Chicago, IL)

Dischord's latest signings are definitely the label's most ambitious project. Smart Went Crazy break the monotony. Even before you realize that they're using cello, organ and trumpet, SWC's tunes unfold with an understated power. Rifled with black humour and scathing bitterness, hatred has rarely sounded so inviting.
--- Totally Wired (UK)