Ocean Rain - Legacy

Legacy

"Ocean Rain stood out for me as a unique and special album the first time I heard it. It captured a great band at the perfect moment and has a lasting, timeless quality which still reverberates in every song."

The album still attracts mixed critical commentary. In a highly positive retrospective review on Allmusic, Jason Ankeny gave the album a 5-star rating. He described the album as "dramatic and majestic", praising the "sweeping string arrangements and hauntingly evocative production." He felt that in comparison to the band's Porcupine album, the "conventional and simple structural parameters" of Ocean Rain made it Echo & the Bunnymen's "most beautiful and memorable effort" and he asserted that "The Killing Moon" was the band's "unrivalled pinnacle".

When reissued in 2003, Andrew Harrison in Blender described the album as "a portrait of splendid derangement with spectacular orchestrations". Mojo said the album had "effervescent songs, sympathetically orchestrated".

In his 2005 book Rip It Up and Start Again: Post Punk 1978–1984, British music journalist Simon Reynolds describes the album as "lush, orchestrated and overtly erotic". Mark Blacklock, in Robert Dimery's 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, wrote that the album's confidence, lush strings, romance, warmth and poetry, means that "it stands the test of time better than any other Bunnymen album".

Among less positive commentaries, Pitchfork described the album as being "stuffed with queasy midtempo tracks and bizarre orchestration" although they did say that the album was not impenetrable, ultimately giving it an 8.6/10. Reviewing the collector's edition for the BBC, Chris Jones described the album as "the point where the cracks began to show, but were masked with such beauty as to hardly matter". Jones went on to say how the 35-piece orchestra helped on tracks such as "Nocturnal Me" but made others, such as "The Yo-Yo Man", "flounder under the weight of intrusive arrangements".