Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| Robert Christgau | A+ |
| Encyclopedia of Popular Music | |
| Mojo | favorable |
| NME | 6/10 |
| Q | |
| Piero Scaruffi | 7.5/10 |
| Rolling Stone (1970) | favorable |
| Rolling Stone (2004) | |
| Yahoo! Music | favorable |
12 Songs was well received by contemporary music critics. Bruce Grimes of Rolling Stone gave it a rave review and called it "the announcement of the full emergence of a leading innovator in rock and roll". Robert Christgau wrote in his initial review of the album, "In every respect—composition, arrangement, production, performance—this is the finest record of the year, much more accessible than the great-but-weird album that preceded it.
Christgau called it "a perfect album" in a retrospective review. Piero Scaruffi wrote in his review, "Newman, one of the most accomplished songwriters of his time, revealed his prodigious talent on, a cycle of vignettes about life in the city, that boasted catchy melodies as well as eclectic arrangements." Allmusic editor Mark Deming dubbed the album "superb material brilliantly executed" and cited it as Newman's "first great album, and ... still one of his finest moments on record." In 2003, the album was ranked number 354 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In The New Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), Rolling Stone journalist Rob Sheffield gave the album five out of five stars and cited it as "where Newman got loose as a rock & roller, ditching the complex orchestrations for a bluesy, easy-swinging satire of America".
Read more about this topic: 12 Songs (Randy Newman album)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“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)
“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.””
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“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)