"East of the Fault Line" was named one of the albums of the year by Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune and Jim DeRogatis of the Chicago Sun-Times. It also includes the song "Little Charles" from the Tony Award-winning play "August: Osage County".

"Sometimes aging gracefully is the uglier alternative. Raging against the dying of the light may make you the butt of jokes at dinner parties, but at least your name comes up in conversation. David Singer's characters, by contrast, are fading away - hypnotized by nostalgia, exhausted from traveling in circles, and going nowhere. That he sings it all as sweetly and geekily as a middle-school science teacher doesn't make it go down any easier - and when he gets mad, as he does from time to time on the thoughtfully-depressing East Of The Fault Line, it's as arresting as an official reprimand from an authority you figured was too kind to holler at you. "You don't even remember the holes in your heart in time", warns Singer on "Amaranthine", suggesting that we don't overcome our failures - we just rearrange the present so that we don't have to look at them squarely. Not that adulthood comes off much better here: the grown-up romantic relationships on Fault Line are either stunted or unrequited, or some combination of both. When he shows a lover the door, his poetic turn (barely) masks the total extent of his emotional devastation and general disappointment. "You can jump and hover in space", he tells a girlfriend, gently but firmly, "let the earth spin beneath you and softly land in some other place." His discography suggests he's another young writer who is putting an emo-pop background to good classic-rock use: if Singer wasn't such a top-drawer lyricist in the time-tested Costello style, this record wouldn't hurt anywhere near as good as it does. It all builds to "Snow", a five-and-a-half minute remembrance of a failed high school relationship - awkward sex, allergies, meditations on the impermanence of love, names scrawled in wet cement, and ice-cold Midwestern horribleness. Singer's band has two modes, but what evocative modes they are!, legit Blonde On Blonde-style aching grandeur and wrist-slitting Either/Or claustrophobic intimacy. "Snow" combines them both. Just when you think you're set up for a breather, they lay a killer Leonard Cohen cover on you, complete with a berserk trumpet lead and the most scathing vocal performance on the set. Singer's eye for telling detail has probably gotten him compared to Lloyd Cole, and that's okay as a direction - they're both thesaurus-toting believers in the mot juste, and neither one is afraid to depress the hell out of you in the name of good entertainment. But if Cole was ready to be heartbroken, David Singer sounds like he's ready for something - anything - else." - Tris McCall