Critical Reception
Critical reaction to the album was polarized. Rolling Stone gave Zaireeka four stars out of five, writing: "Zaireeka's wall-of-surround-sound approach melds droning-rock dissonance with warped, off-kilter pop melodies, producing a totally immersing post-Pet Sounds audio séance." Allmusic mentioned that the album would only really be accessible to hardcore Flaming Lips fans, but that "they're in for the musical experience of a lifetime".
Critics who disliked the album cited what they viewed as a ridiculous concept. Salon remarked in its review that "Musically their 1995 album Clouds Taste Metallic offers the same psychotic results without all the technological hassle. And conceptually? The same thing, just all at once: stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid." Jason Josephs from Pitchfork criticized the album for being inaccessible, asking "Do I want to buy three more CD players with which to enjoy Zeireeka or, say, eat?"
Read more about this topic: Zaireeka
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or reception:
“An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.”
—Thomas Mann (18751955)
“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)