Imaginos - Critical and Commercial Reception

Critical and Commercial Reception

Imaginos received mixed reviews both from professional critics and fans.

David Fricke, in his review for the magazine Rolling Stone, considers Imaginos "the best black-plastic blitz to bear the Cult's trademark cross and claw since 1974's Secret Treaties", but remarks that the "lengthy gestation" of the album and the many musicians involved makes it "a bit of a cheat for Cult Purists", and that is "only an illusionary re-creation of the way BÖC used to be". William Ruhlmann of Allmusic wrote that Imaginos is "the album that comes closest to defining Blue Öyster Cult" and their "creative swan song", and "perhaps BÖC's most consistent album, certainly its most uncompromising (...) and also the closest thing to a real heavy-metal statement from a band that never quite fit that description". For Don Kaye of Kerrang!, the album is "the best BÖC slab since (...) Cultösaurus Erectus and harks back in style and attitude towards the brilliance of masterpieces like Secret Treaties and Spectres". A contrary evaluation comes from Blue Öyster Cult biographer Martin Popoff, who has "come to dismiss it as somewhat of a sell-out". Despite it being "the band’s heaviest, fulfilling many a fan’s wish for sustained metal", Popoff finds "the whole thing perched on the edge of parody, too dressy and fantastical lyrically in a painfully self-conscious way, (...) a laborious exercise in expected weird", ultimately "a baffling yet anticlimactic punctuation to the band’s perplexed career". The Metal Archives reviewer thinks that the album "would have been an excellent idea if they'd done it as a follow-up to Secret Treaties", but in 1988 "AORish, middle-of-the-road 80s rock cliché clutters up what should have been a fine prog-leaning concept album", evidenced in that the original versions of "Astronomy" and "Subhuman" are definitely better than the new ones. A reviewer from the Italian music criticism site Storia della Musica points out that the album is now a 'cult' item for its rarity, its content and the scarce love shown by the band for this work. He writes that "it could have been the Tommy or The Dark Side of the Moon of BÖC" but, "despite the profound influences it evokes", its "mutilated and sabotaged form" and the disinterest of the musicians involved makes Imaginos only a wasted opportunity.

The reviews posted by Blue Öyster Cult's fans and by buyers of the album on the customer review site Epinions and on the online collaborative metadata database Rate Your Music are in general quite positive, praising Imaginos as a "creative masterpiece", but underlining that the work is not a group effort but "the brain-child of original drummer Albert Bouchard and longtime producer and lyricist Sandy Pearlman". A professional Italian reviewer describes the Blue Öyster Cult name on the cover as "only a commercial decoy" for an Albert Bouchard solo album. The few negative customer reviews lament mainly the fragmented and dated 80's production, which makes Imaginos "a very messy and confusing concept album".

The album entered the Billboard 200 album chart on 19 August 1988, peaked at No. 122, and exited the charts on 8 October. It sold about 50,000 copies in the US, and was a commercial failure for Columbia Records and a financial failure for the band, which was forced through legal action to pay back the money used for both the recording of Albert Bouchard's solo album and for the re-recording of Imaginos.