Dry (album) - Reception

Reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source Rating
About.com
Allmusic
Robert Christgau A-
Entertainment Weekly A+
NME (9/10)
Q
Rolling Stone Favorable
The Rolling Stone Album Guide

Upon its release, Dry received positive critical acclaim. Former Village Voice editor and Pazz & Jop journalist Robert Christgau described the album as an "essential feminist distinction between egoist bullroar and honest irrational outpouring--and of course by her postrockist guitar, where she starts to reinvent her instrument the way grrrl-punks reinvent their form," rating the album an A-. According to Variety, the album was “not so much stripped-down rock as it is flayed-alive rock”. MTV described it as "a dark, twisted, arresting work which sounds both rubbed red raw and invigorating", while the NME praised it as "a crossover point possessing natural songwriting and scorching guitar noise" in its 9/10 review. Around the time of the album’s release, Harvey attracted some controversy for posing topless, with her back to the camera and baring an unshaven armpit, on the cover of NME. Received as well in the States as the UK, the album prompted Rolling Stone magazine to name the then-22-year-old Harvey the year's Best Songwriter and Best New Female Singer. In spite of the acclaim, "Sheela-Na-Gig" was the only single to chart in the US, at #9 on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart.

Read more about this topic:  Dry (album)

Famous quotes containing the word reception:

    Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.
    Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)

    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)

    He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!
    Billy Wilder (b. 1906)