Though the song was a huge success, reaching number 1 in the UK Singles Chart and becoming a significant milestone in the development of British acid house music,[9] A.R.

[10] When asked by The Quietus "what happened to the A. R. Kane sound from [1987 to 1988]" and if the band were recording 69 simultaneously with the EP, Rudy Tambala of the duo only replied: "Up Home!

An experimental dream pop album, 69 was eclectically influenced by several artists, including mid-1980s Cocteau Twins,[12] electric-era Miles Davis,[13] Can,[13] and the "disregard for sonic structure" of dub music, whereby 69 "disappears into distant echoes that strikingly predict the succulent Seefeel."

[14] Music journalist Simon Reynolds described 69 as finding "unprecedented connections" between jazz, dub, acid rock, Sonic Youth-style "reinvention of the guitar" and Cocteau Twins circa Head Over Heels.

[4] Ned Raggett said 69 shows the band being "playful, mysterious, and inventive all at once, impossible to truly pin down", saying that the album was "never simply poppy nor completely arty, and definitely not just the Jesus and Mary Chain/Cocteau Twins fusion most claimed they were.

"[7] The record is characterized by its usage of feedback,[12] murmured, dizzy voices,[12][15] "vapor-trail guitars,"[15] "echo-laden rhythms,"[15] submerged grooves,[15] and its possession of "a very stripped down sound" with "tracks that at times straddle the line of music and noise.

"[5] Besides the Cocteau Twins and the Jesus and Mary Chain, critics drew comparisons between parts of the album and Lee "Scratch" Perry's productions,[17] Gong,[17] early Pink Floyd,[17] the "experimental end" of Jimi Hendrix,[17] John Martyn,[4] Arthur Russell,[4] Public Image Ltd,[5] the Durutti Column,[5] Van Morrison's Astral Weeks,[4] and Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom.

[15] Reynolds contemporarily described the album as "an idyll midway" between Miles Davis' Bitches Brew and Cocteau Twins' aforementioned Head Over Heels.

[4] Music Arcades, calling the album "pretty elliptical," noted that some of the tracks on 69 would not necessarily be considered songs, but "doodles in sound — but they also showed they could be very commercial when they wanted to be.

According to Ned Raggett of AllMusic, opening song "Crazy Blue" resembles "little else recorded that year or any other one", and begins with a few plucked guitar notes and a sudden "jazzy scat-vamp" by Tambala "with his unique voice", followed by "a more direct poppish strum" and "a series of intense reverbed chime sounds and bongo-like percussion.

"[7] The song features a sway of cello and vocals, counterpointed by a "catacomb of screams" described by Reynolds as combining John Lydon with Tim Buckley.

[4] "Spermwhale Trip Over" was described by Ott as an "oddly titled masterpiece" and "the album's hallmark", saying that "the track's present-tense update of the Cocteau Twins' ethereal elegies is perhaps the group's defining moment.

[12] "The Sun Falls into the Sea" was described by Reynolds as "just incomparable: a mermaid lullaby not so much "accompanied" as almost drowned out by a sound like an immense quartz harp the size of a whale's exoskeleton, from which harmonics disperse and scatter as haywire as sunlight refracting beneath the ocean surface.

It's not the notes played, but the untranscribeable opalescence of the stuff of this sound that's so unbearably lovely", with a melancholy waltz structure leading into the final track, the instrumental "Spanish Quay (3)".

[23] Geoff Halpin is credited with packaging "design", with John Geary drawing the "69" illustration on the album cover and Paul Khera for the "sleeve.

[25] Pitchfork considered the remasters of the two albums to be "the jewels in the crown of One Little Indian's Crossing the Pond reissue campaign" alongside Disco Inferno's D. I.

"[13] Geiger said that "the title's reference to the sexual position is obvious, but the figure symbolizes also opposed the connectedness, the circle organic ran from one to the other.

Inner-case's intricate shading shows the blue background and more clearly six-figure as a pregnant woman and nine-figure as a man, both swimming, in harmonious movements.

"[4] He said that numerous different aspects of the album reminded him of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks (1968)–"the child-woman fixations, the tongue-tied murmur, the scat-nonsense whose alliteration assonance skirt the edges of the "more can be said," the sense of the halcyon recovered of sky-gardens all wet with angel tears.

In the 1995 Spin Alternative Record Guide, Simon Reynolds said that 69 "was a druggy drift of swoony sensuality, narcotic reverie and polymorphous desire, Alex's frail vocal wandering through labyrinthine sound-grottoes.

"[17] Rob Fitzpatrick of The Guardian commented that 69 was, "creatively, AR Kane's high-water mark," describing it as "a brilliantly sprawling and ambitious collection that was immersive and playful – and completely off the wall.

"[31] Upon its 2004 reissue, Chris Ott of Pitchfork wrote that the album revealed that "the unreal boom-box beat" of "Anitina" [the B-side to "Pump Up the Volume" that was billed as an A.R.

"[12] In The Great Rock Bible, Martin C. Strong called the album "seminal," saying, "closer in many respects to PiL in bed with The Durutti Column", the duo's fantasy-league trips to the moon and back resulted in excellent ethereal pieces," namely "Crazy Blue", "Baby Milk Catcher", "Suicide Kiss" and "Sperm Whale Trip Over".

Kane "were pioneers before their time but 69, their 1988 debut, is still seen today as splendid avant garde black pop with flashes of white, whichever way you look at it.

Kane anticipated virtually all of the key musical breakthroughs of the 1990s a decade before the fact, with the roots of everything from shoegazing to trip-hop to ambient dub -- even those of post-rock -- lying in their dreamy, oceanic sound."

[23] According to Geiger, 69 is "both an important rock-historical document and a key liaison to the hybrid-like solutions of rock stereotypes that happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

[12] Tambala stated that highly regarded shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine's song "Slow", which he described as the birth of their signature "giddy, slip-sliding sound," was directly influenced by "Baby Milk Snatcher.

Kane's blending of "dub, feedback, psychedelic dream-pop, house and free jazz" can still be heard in modern artists such as Radiohead, Four Tet, Animal Collective and Burial.