AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine said the album "can frequently be maddening" but found it "undeniably interesting, at once a quintessential oddity and a strangely promising debut".

[2] Summarizing the album's sound as "grandly, absurdly ambitious, symphonic folk-soul", Erlewine emphasized its "juxtapositions of folk, bossa nova, jazz, and soul" which "seem as accidental as they are intentional", and said that "ambition is not Howard's problem – if anything, he has too much of it – but execution is".

[2] PopMatters's Quentin B. Huff also called the album "ambitious", noting that "no two songs sound alike, although strings, guitars, and tempo changes seem to be staples in Terrence Howard's bag of music tricks."

Huff criticized Howard's vocals as "the album's least compelling aspect", where his middle range is "sometimes scratchy, shakes and sounds distractingly unsteady.

"[1] Both critics agreed that the album was reminiscent of, and would've been in better hands with, Terence Trent D'Arby,[2][1] with Huff concluding that Howard "ends up sounding like a less convincing version of a guy who's famous for doing what he's trying to do now.