The Stone Roses (album) - Reception

Reception

Upon its release in the United Kingdom, The Stone Roses received little attention from music critics and consumers. It was well received by British publications NME and Melody Maker, who were covering the Madchester music scene at the time. Bob Stanley of Melody Maker called the album "godlike" and found the "spine of the LP" to be John Squire's guitar playing, which he called "beautifully flowing, certainly psychedelic, there are elements of Hendrix (especially on 'Shoot You Down') and Marr (check out the fade to 'Bye Bye Badman'), but the rest is the lad's own work." NME ranked The Stone Roses number two on its year-end list for 1989. The band received more mainstream exposure after their debut on Top of the Pops in 1990. In his consumer guide for The Village Voice, American reviewer Robert Christgau found the band "overhyped", questioning "What do they do that a hundred Amerindie bands don't do just as well now?" He quipped "they're surprisingly 'eclectic.' Not all that good at it, but eclectic" and stated, "Though they have their moments as songwriters—'Bye Bye Badman' always stops me, and 'I Want to Be Adored' sums them up—their music is about sound, fingers lingering over the strings and so forth."

Since its initial reception, The Stone Roses has received retrospective acclaim from critics and musicians alike. In a review upon its 1999 reissue, Q dubbed the album "pure pop alchemy" and stated, " still fascinates it remains clear that here was a band – and an album – in a million". Mojo strongly recommended the reissue to consumers and stated, "Set the tone for rock music in the '90s; nostalgic and unable or unwilling to communicate any message except feed your head, question nothing, look elegantly vacant". Bernadette McNulty of The Daily Telegraph commended its 2009 reissue for polishing the band's "ultraconfident blend of sun-drenched, jangly psychedelia and whip-smart, dance floor rhythms", and said of the original album's musical significance, "Compared to the dark, macho Mancunians who came swaggering in their wake, the beauty of this mythological debut twenty years later is its light, almost feminine beauty." Rolling Stone gave it four ouf of five stars in a review of its legacy edition reissue, calling it "a blast of magnificent arrogance, a fusion of Sixties-pop sparkle and the blown-mind drive of U.K. rave culture." In The New Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), contributing editor David Wild gave the album four out of five stars and noted "Elephant Stone" and "Fools Gold" as highlights.

BBC Music's Chris Jones complimented the band's "unmistakeable swagger and defiance" and stated, "as an accurate picture of how working class hedonism fused dance and rock in the dying days of the 80s, this album is unbeatable." On the other hand, The Quietus editor Neil Kulkarni and commented that "for two whole thirds of this album an awesome heartbeat ill-served by their frontmen" and stated, "In comparison to the real highlights of '89, whether they bequeathed whole scenes or slipped into oblivion, The Stone Roses is some over-rated filler-heavy bullshit." On the album's legacy, Zeth Lundy of the Boston Phoenix wrote that The Stone Roses "has been deified by such dubious tastemakers as the NME and Oasis's Noel Gallagher — and the rest of us really like it too."