Reception
The album was initially unsuccessful, especially in the UK, where over half the sales were exports to America; though it has gone on to be viewed as a one-off psychedelic classic, influential on the development of the neo-psychedelia music genre, and on a number of 80s bands, especially R.E.M.. Bill Holdship in a 2001 review in Rolling Stone commented that the album's influences could be detected "on bands ranging from R.E.M. and the Replacements to the Stone Roses and the Pixies", and that it "offers modern listeners some great, great rock songs".
Stephen Thomas Erlewine in a retrospective review for Allmusic felt that the music on the album showed the influence of the Beatles, the Byrds and Syd Barrett, and that in its turn it influenced the jangle pop of R.E.M. and other underground pop of the 1980s.
Matt LeMay in a 2010 review for Pitchfork felt that the album was unsuccessful on release in 1981 as the timing was wrong as audiences had little interest in "music that incorporated the indelible harmonies of the Byrds and the surrealism of Syd Barrett"; but that anyhow the album is "best considered with the benefit of hindsight, and for all the famous music it inspired, there is still nothing quite like Underwater Moonlight".
Read more about this topic: Underwater Moonlight
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)