Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| Robert Christgau | C− |
| Rolling Stone | (mixed) |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide | |
Critical response to the album was mixed. Richard Cromelin of Rolling Stone summarized that "Nursery Cryme's main problem lies not in Genesis' concepts, which are, if nothing else, outrageously imaginative and lovably eccentric, nor with their musical structures—long, involved, multi-movemented frameworks on which they hang their narratives—nor even with their playing, which does get pretty lethargic at points. It's the godawful production, a murky, distant stew that at best bubbles quietly when what is desperately needed are the explosions of drums and guitars, the screaming of the organ, the abrasive rasp of vocal cords." He nonetheless took the time to remark positively on some of the songs, and note that he saw promise in the band.
Retrospective reviews have been mildly positive. BBC Music praised the two new members of the band as fundamental to Genesis's artistic success, remarking "Collins’ snappy drums were augmented by his uncanny ability to sound not unlike Gabriel Hackett’s armoury of tapping and swell techniques really broadened the palette of the band, giving Tony Banks more room for his Delius-lite organ filigrees, not to mention their newly purchased Mellotron", and gushed that "Genesis had virtually invented their own genre, Edwardian rock." Though Stephen Thomas Erlewine of Allmusic deemed the album highly uneven, he considered "The Musical Box" and "The Return of the Giant Hogweed" to be "genuine masterpieces", and concluded that even if the rest of the album "isn't quite as compelling or quite as structured, it doesn't quite matter because these are the songs that showed what Genesis could do, and they still stand as pinnacles of what the band could achieve." Robert Christgau's brief review consisted entirely of sarcastic exclamations. Geddy Lee of Rush included this album among his favourites in a list from an interview with The Quietus.
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