Critical Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Aggregate scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Metacritic | (66/100) |
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| Alternative Press | |
| The A.V. Club | (positive) |
| Blender | |
| Drowned in Sound | (9/10) |
| Entertainment Weekly | C |
| Mojo | |
| PopMatters | |
| Robert Christgau | A- |
| Rolling Stone | |
John Bush from Allmusic said that Elephunk "possesses some of the most boundary-pushing productions in contemporary, (mostly) uncommercial hip-hop" and gave the album a 4/5 star rating. Chris Nettleton from Drowned in Sound complimented the album saying: "This record is full of first rate rapping, first rate tunes, first rate instrumentation. Look on the surface, and you've got an album full of memorable songs, hooks that lodge in your mind... but look in depth, and it's quality from the top down." In his consumer guide for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau commented that the group "remain unbelievable, but in pop that's just one more aesthetic nuance", and stated, "In which the unbelievably dull El Lay alt-rappers fabricate the brightest actual pop album of 2003." Entertainment Weekly had more of a negative view on the record: "They try dancehall ('Hey Mama'), salsa ('Latin Girls'), even nu-metal ('Anxiety' with Papa Roach), but the biggest offense for a once smart-sounding rap collective is 'Where Is the Love?', the horrifyingly trite single. It's enough to make longtime fans wonder, 'Where are the Peas?'" The album received a C grade. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album has received an average score of 66, based on 15 reviews indicating generally positive reviews.
Read more about this topic: Elephunk
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