Living in The Material World - Reception

Reception

Among the expectant music critics, Stephen Holden of Rolling Stone began his highly favourable album review with an enthusiastic "At last it's here". He hailed the new Harrison set as a "pop classic", a "profoundly seductive record", and well worth the two-and-a-half-year wait. "Happily, the album is not just a commercial event," he wrote, "it is the most concise, universally conceived work by a former Beatle since John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band."

Like Holden, Village Voice contributor Nicholas Schaffner approved of the singer's gesture in donating publishing royalties to the recently launched Material World Charitable Foundation and praised the album's "exquisite musical underpinnings". Even if the "transcendent dogma" was not always to his taste, Schaffner acknowledged that in Living in the Material World, Harrison had "devised a luxuriant rock devotional designed to transform his fans' stereo equipment into a temple". Billboard magazine noted the twin themes found throughout the album − "the Beatles and their mish-mash" versus a "spiritual undercoat" − and declared Harrison's vocals "first-rate".

Among those critics who did not agree with Holden's assessment that, of all the four Beatles, Harrison had inherited "the most precious" legacy − namely, "the spiritual aura that the group accumulated, beginning with the White Album" − the reaction was noticeably less euphoric than that afforded All Things Must Pass in 1970–71. Some, particularly in Britain, took exception to what they viewed as "preachy overtones", at best, or "a relentlously pious nature", as the more extreme detractors saw it. "So damn holy I could scream" was the conclusion of the NME's album reviewer. That publication's pairing of Carr and Tyler were equally dismissive two years later in The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, bemoaning Harrison's habit of "didactically imposing said Holy Memoirs upon innocent record-collectors" and declaring the album's spiritual theme "almost as offensive in its own way" as Lennon and Ono's Some Time in New York City. Other writers similarly "turned up their noses", as if to prove a point Harrison had made in a Melody Maker interview some time before: "They feel threatened when you talk about something that isn't just 'be-bop-a-lula'. And if you say the words 'God' … or 'Lord', it makes some people's hair curl."

Aside from the themes stated in its lyrics, the album's production and musicianship were widely praised, Schaffner noting: "Surely Phil Spector never had a more attentive pupil." Even Carr and Tyler lauded Harrison's "superb and accomplished slide-guitar breaks", and the solos on "Give Me Love", "The Lord Loves the One", "The Light That Has Lighted the World" and "Living in the Material World" have each been identified as exemplary and the finest of Harrison's career.

In the decades since its release, Living in the Material World has continued to divide album reviewers and music commentators; writing in 2002, Greg Kot of Rolling Stone found the album "drearily monochromatic" compared to its predecessor, and to PopMatters' Zeth Lundy, it suffers from "a more anonymous tract" next to the "cathedral-grade significance" of All Things Must Pass. John Metzger of Music Box, however, refers to Harrison's Living in the Material World as "the most underrated and overlooked album of his career"; it "coalesces around its songs", Metzger adds, "and the Zen-like beauty that emanates from Harrison’s hymns to a higher power inevitably becomes subtly affecting."

Among Harrison's biographers, the 1973 album is consistently viewed with great enthusiasm. Unimpressed with the "aimless jamming" and "looser abundance" of All Things Must Pass, Alan Clayson approves of Material World's "self-production criterion closer to the style of George Martin". Within the more restrained surroundings, Clayson continues, Harrison was able to lay a claim to the title "king of rock 'n' roll slide guitar" as well as display perhaps his "most magnificent performance on record" on the Roy Orbison-style "Who Can See It". Robert Rodriguez also approves of a production aesthetic that frees Harrison's songs from the "tyranny" of Spector's Wall of Sound, allowing instruments to "sparkle" and "breathing space" for his melodies.

Another biographer, Gary Tillery, considers Material World a "fine companion piece" to the 1970 triple album. Simon Leng has named Living in the Material World as his personal favourite of all of Harrison's solo albums. In his musical biography While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Leng refers to the album as a "forgotten blockbuster" due to its standing having been somewhat lost amid rock-music revisionism since the early '70s. To Leng, with its combination of a defiant "protest" song in "The Day the World Gets 'Round", the anti-stardom "The Lord Loves the One" and "perfect pop confections" in "Give Me Love" and "Don't Let Me Wait Too Long", Living in the Material World was the last album to capture the same clear-sighted, utopian spirit that had so characterised the 1960s.

On a solo set that he identifies as representing Harrison's guitar playing and songwriting "at something of a peak", Allmusic's Bruce Eder likewise welcomes Material World's bold idealism. "Even in the summer of 1973, after years of war and strife and disillusionment," Eder writes, "some of us were still sort of looking − to borrow a phrase from a Lennon-McCartney song − or hoping to get from them something like 'the word' that would make us free. And George, God love him, had the temerity to actually oblige ..."