Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| Robert Christgau | A |
| Paste | favorable |
| Pitchfork | favorable |
| PopMatters | very favorable |
| Rolling Stone | favorable |
| Piero Scaruffi | 7/10 |
| Stylus Magazine | favorable |
On its release in January 1974, Radio City met with general acclaim. Record World judged the musicianship "superb"; Billboard described the album as "a highly commercial set", and Cashbox called it "a collection of excellent material". However, sales were thwarted by an inability to make the album available in stores. Stax Records, primary distributor for the band's Ardent Records label, had recently placed distribution of its catalog in the hands of the much larger Columbia Records; Radio City's release coincided with a disagreement between Stax and Columbia, which left Columbia refusing to distribute the catalog. As a result, the album achieved only minimal sales of around 20,000 copies at the time.
Giving an "A" rating, Robert Christgau calls the album "Brilliant, addictive", observing meanwhile that ""The harmonies sound like the lead sheets are upside down and backwards, the guitar solos sound like screwball readymade pastiches, and the lyrics sound like love is strange Can an album be catchy and twisted at the same time?" Allmusic's William Ruhlmann considers that the band's follow-up to #1 Record "lacked something of the pop sweetness (especially the harmonies)" of the debut but captured "Alex Chilton's urgency (sometimes desperation) on songs that made his case as a genuine rock & roll eccentric. If #1 Record had a certain pop perfection that brought everything together, Radio City was the sound of everything falling apart, which proved at least as compelling."
Read more about this topic: Radio City (album)
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