Echo & the Bunnymen played a number of concerts in 2008 where they performed Ocean Rain in full and with the backing of an orchestra.

[14] When the band's John Peel session was broadcast on 10 October 1983, the punk zine Jamming said, "[The songs] hint at a readjustment and a period of new positive recovery.

"[14] Echo & the Bunnymen were booked to headline a two-week youth festival at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon on the evening of 23 October 1983.

[14] At the end of 1983 Echo & the Bunnymen recorded a live special called A Crystal Day for the Channel 4 programme The Tube.

[16] Ignoring their old material, the band played "The Killing Moon", "Nocturnal Me", "Ocean Rain" – which had now developed into a ballad – and an early version of "Thorn of Crowns" called "Cucumber".

[12] Continuing the band's prominent use of strings – which began with the 1982 single "The Back of Love" – they recorded Ocean Rain using a 35-piece orchestra.

"[20] During recording De Freitas used xylophones and glockenspiels in addition to his usual percussion, bass player Les Pattinson used an old reverb machine at des Dames and Sergeant's solo on "My Kingdom" was played using a Washburn acoustic guitar which he distorted through a valve radio.

"[23] Along with the other four of the band's first five albums, Ocean Rain was remastered and reissued on CD in 2003—these releases were marketed as 25th anniversary editions.

Eight bonus tracks were added to the album: "Angels and Devils", which had been recorded at The Automatt in San Francisco, was the B-side to the single "Silver" and was produced by The Bunnymen and Alan Perman; five Life at Brian's – Lean and Hungry tracks ("All You Need Is Love", "The Killing Moon", "Stars Are Stars", "Villiers Terrace" and "Silver"), which had been recorded for the Channel 4 programme Play at Home; and two live tracks ("My Kingdom" and "Ocean Rain"), which were recorded for A Crystal Day, a Channel 4 special for The Tube.

Describing Echo & the Bunnymen's change from the more rock sound of their previous albums to the lighter sound of Ocean Rain, music journalist Max Bell said in his 1984 review for The Times newspaper, "This time vocalist Ian McCulloch has tempered his metaphysical songs with a romantic sweetness and the band's melodies are more to the fore.

Acoustic guitars, brushes and sparingly used keyboards all add to the album's optimistic warmth and there is a consistency of atmosphere in songs like 'Seven Seas' and 'Silver', the current single, which justifies the departure.

"[25] However, Parke Puterbaugh of Rolling Stone rated the album two out of five stars and described it as "too often a monochromatic dirge of banal existential imagery cloaked around the mere skeleton of a musical idea".

He went on to criticise McCulloch's lyrics, which he described as "tired juxtapositions of mysterious buzzwords, nonsense, and banality", and the music, "mellotron-style wash of strings and bleating wood winds".

[34] "The Killing Moon" is featured in the original theatrical version of the opening sequence of the 2001 cult film Donnie Darko.

However, in the director's cut version of the film, the song is replaced by INXS's "Never Tear Us Apart", with "The Killing Moon" being placed later in the movie.

[38] Pitchfork critic Joe Tangari found that on Ocean Rain, the band had "mellowed to a degree... but all it did was cause them to get weirder"; he described the album as "stuffed with queasy midtempo tracks and bizarre orchestration", yet also "by no means impenetrable", concluding that "a chilly, haunted ambience settles over the whole recording like a fine dust.

"[39] In his 2005 book Rip It Up and Start Again: Post Punk 1978–1984, British music journalist Simon Reynolds describes the album as "lush, orchestrated and [...] overtly erotic".

Reviewing the collector's edition for the BBC, Chris Jones described the album as both "the last truly great record they made" and "the point where the cracks began to show, but were masked with such beauty as to hardly matter".

[49] Jones went on to say how the 35-piece orchestra helped on tracks such as "Nocturnal Me" but made others, such as "The Yo-Yo Man", "flounder under the weight of intrusive arrangements".

[52] Giving the London concert five out of five stars, Angus Batey, writing in The Guardian, described "The Killing Moon" as a "dizzying high" which was "topped by 'Ocean Rain' itself, where the strings are held back until the end of the second verse so that they hit with a euphoric punch of almost physical intensity, sunny melodic optimism piercing the lyrics' chiaroscuro of storm clouds and 'blackest thoughts'.

[50] Reviewing the New York concert for Rolling Stone, Jim Allen described Radio City as an "appropriately dramatic, grandiose setting",[57] and added that McCulloch "was in fine voice, growling and sneering wondrously".