[7] PopMatters says that the album "mixes the story of the protagonist Sebastian and his journey towards learning to trust people and ultimate disillusionment with a psychedelic pop score that fittingly captured the mood of 1960s Swinging London".

[14] In Rolling Stone, Lester Bangs termed it "an ultra-pretentious concept album, complete with strained 'story' [...] like some grossly puerile cross between the Bee Gees, Tommy, and the Moody Blues" and suggested that the band "should be shot for what they've done to English rock lyrics.

[17] The New York Times wrote, "Loaded with rich harmonies, sharp dissonances, odd electronic effects, early Pink Floyd-style psychedelia, proto heavy metal and songs that drastically change styles from one moment to the next, the album was full of pop experiments and abstractions that have become a calling card for current underground alternative bands.

May’s molten-Wilfred Owen lyrics on Private Sorrow, the Greek chorus wails and Taylor’s sheet metal guitars on Old Man Going and Balloon Burning signposted a bad trip tour de force.

[19] The 2009 incarnation of the Pretty Things featuring May, Taylor, Frank Holland, George Perez, Jack Greenwood and Mark St. John would perform the album onstage on 10 April, at the 5th annual le Beat Bespoke Weekender sponsored by Mojo magazine.

"[17] The Guardian called it "one of the few consistently brilliant British psych albums [...] the taut drums and endless two-note guitar riff of Balloon Burning sounds remarkably like motorik krautrock a decade early [...] the SF Sorrow-era Pretty Things seem not disaster-prone but perfectly poised, not behind the times but ahead of them.