“Paul Bergmann is a prize-fighter: sinuous, sinewy, a ballerina in a bloodspot arena.”                                                                                                                   L.A. Record

Paul Bergmann’s latest opus of agony, No Masters in Paradise, isn’t angling for approval or affirmation in the way early- and mid-career albums often do. A man with a pickaxe at the wall of existential meaning, Bergmann has never failed to make the pain of our time excruciatingly personal, and you can hear it in his voice in these tracks. “Piss in my Hand” recalls Tom Waits, Iceage, or late-era Leonard Cohen, where the voice itself has been denuded of warmth, when Bergmann sings “Don’t make me plastic/Don’t make me care/Don’t think there’s a part of me/I want to bare.” He’s still looking for answers, and you can hear from the resignation in his voice that he’s pretty sure there’s nothing to find—“We’re getting old/Nothing is won.” If there are no masters in paradise, it seems like the culmination of Bergmann’s oeuvre to lament that there is no paradise in mastery, either.