[1] AllMusic editor Ned Raggett placed the album in the context of its contemporaneous scene, writing that it "crystallized an incipient 1990s underground as in thrall to folk music as to feedback blasts and Krautrock influences.

[7] "If any one thing could be singled out about the album," Raggett writes, "it's the continual contrast between Pearce's soft, reflective singing, often sunk deep into the overall mix and treated with heavy-duty echo, and his often tremendous guitar work, electric squalls, and drones piled atop one another.

[7] Gravenhurst's Nick Talbot, writing in The Quietus, highlighted a sense of romanticism in the song titles and lyrics, and Pearce's use of "a pagan semiology to paint an escapist fantasy.

[2] This quality was highlighted by Nick Talbot, who wrote that the "unprecedentedly noisy" album "took lo-fi to hitherto uncharted depths by making technologically compromised bedroom amateurism an essential part of its unique, rural psychedelia.

In particular... he found a way of emulating a choral ensemble by turning down the tone dial of his electric guitar and gently drawing a screwdriver crossways against the strings, through a distortion and a delay unit.

"[2] Talbot also noted the incorporation of "squalling clarinets, mesmerically delayed tribal percussion and pitch-shifted howls and moans, appearing and disappearing in a rainstorm of autodidactic chaos.