Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| adriandenning.co.uk | |
| Allmusic | |
| Robert Christgau | B+ |
| Scott Floman | B+ |
| Rolling Stone | (not rated) |
Lester Bangs reviewed the album for Rolling Stone in 1978 and commented: "Wavelength is a very nice record. I'm sure all the people at Warner Bros. are pleased with it. Ditto the DJs... Still, though, it do confound how such a monumental talent can mire himself in such twaddle, fine as some of it may be."
Melody Maker reviewed the album as evidence of Morrison's "drift into the American Dream."
Stephen Thomas Erlewine with Allmusic rated the album four stars and wrote that "Wavelength essentially picks up where A Period of Transition left off, offering a focused, full-bodied alternative to that record's warmly fuzzy lack of direction."
Robert Christgau referred to it as a "good album" and called attention to side two, which he felt was "an evocative reinterpretation of Van's America fixation, but side one is nothing more (and nothing less) than class programming."
Time magazine critics wrote: "During a career that has lasted well over a decade, Van Morrison has made two, maybe three albums that rank high among the finest of all rock 'n' roll. Wavelength is good enough to stand close by Morrison's best work, a record of sinuous, sensuous magic. The man just can't be beat."
Read more about this topic: Wavelength (album)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“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)
“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)