Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| Blender | |
| Encyclopedia of Popular Music | |
| Pitchfork Media | 9.5/10 |
| Robert Christgau | positive |
Smiley Smile stands amongst the Beach Boys' most acclaimed albums, receiving numerous accolades and industry praise. Pete Townshend of The Who is a known admirer of the record, as is Robbie Robertson of The Band. In a 2012 interview with Time, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith stated that his "island" music picks would be albums by AC/DC, The Rolling Stones, and Smiley Smile, "Just for the melodic f--- all."
Richie Unterberger of AllMusic gave the album four out of five stars, calling it "a rather nifty, if rather slight, effort that's plenty weird", and noting that the media-hype of the collapsed Smile project at the time was much to blame for its lackluster reception in the United States. In 2007, Robert Christgau and David Fricke, writing for Rolling Stone, named Smiley Smile one of the 40 essential albums of 1967, declaring: "Towering it's not; some kind of hit it is."
Read more about this topic: Smiley Smile
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“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)
“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)