Following her controversial 1987 outing The Walking, Bound By the Beauty was a return to Siberry's trademark quirky but accessible brand of pop music. It received better initial reviews than The Walking, and the title track received more extensive radio airplay than Siberry had seen since "One More Colour" in 1985. However, the whimsical "Everything Reminds Me of My Dog", whose video was still in frequent rotation on MuchMusic as late as 1993, is probably the album's most famous song.
The track "Half Angel Half Eagle" was controversial. Siberry used the images of an angel and an eagle soaring over a city to depict a view of both the beauty and the ugliness of city life; the ugliness was apparent in the lyric "fucking honkyniggerjew/WASPjapdagofag/fucking homeless preacher dyke/cabbie fucking union scab". Siberry was merely commenting on the prevalence of this type of offensive language on the streets of a big city, but some groups initially misunderstood the lyric as an endorsement of racism and homophobia.
"Something About Trains" also appeared on the soundtrack to Peter Mettler's film The Top of His Head.