Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Aggregate scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Metacritic | (79/100) |
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| Entertainment Weekly | B+ |
| Pitchfork Media | (6.9/10) |
| PopMatters | |
| Robert Christgau | B |
| Rolling Stone | |
| Slant Magazine | |
| Spin | (9/10) |
| Stylus Magazine | B+ |
| Yahoo! Music UK | |
In 2002, Sea Change was one of only two albums to receive Rolling Stone magazine's highest rating of five stars, the other being Bruce Springsteen's The Rising. The magazine went on to call it the best album of 2002. The next year, the album was ranked number 440 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. It was ranked number 17 on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 best albums of the 00s.
Sea Change peaked at #8 on Billboard's Top 200 chart and was eventually certified gold in March 2005. In the UK charts, it peaked at #20. As of July 2008, Sea Change has sold 680,000 copies in the United States.
It is said that the album sound concept is inspired by the sound of Serge Gainsbourg's album Histoire de Melody Nelson. Beck would later produce an album for, and record with, Gainsbourg's daughter Charlotte. Critics have also compared the acoustic and relaxed melodies of Sea Change to the works of British singer-songwriter Nick Drake and Bob Dylan's 1975 album Blood on the Tracks.
The album was re-released in a remastered form by Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab in June 2009.
Read more about this topic: Sea Change (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)
“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)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)