Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| Robert Christgau | C− |
| Q | |
| Rolling Stone | mixed |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide | |
| Sputnikmusic | 4.0/5 |
The album peaked at number 5 on the UK Albums Chart, and at number eight in the United States, where it achieved Gold status on advance orders alone. Eventually it sold two million copies in the US. However, it was not well received by contemporary music critics. Rolling Stone's Lester Bangs described Master of Reality as "monotonous" in a mixed review. Robert Christgau of The Village Voice found the band "dull and decadent" and called the album "a dim-witted, amoral exploitation."
In 2001, Q included the album in their list of the 50 Heaviest Albums of All Time, calling it "malevolent...casting Black Sabbath as a Titanic-style house band on the eve of Armageddon, cranking it as the bomb drops." A critic for the magazine cited it as "the most cohesive record of first three albums." In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked the album at number 298 in their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. and called it "the definitive studio relic of Sabbath's golden-hellfire era (1970-74)..."
Read more about this topic: Master Of Reality
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)