[5] The pastoral studio was based in a converted farmhouse with housing for the musicians, a communal dining hall and, according to saxophonist Marty Fogel of the Everyman Band, "a place to hang out and drink Johnnie Walker Black.

[6] In a 1996 interview with Ian Penman of The Guardian, Reed noted that the binaural sound experiment was unsuccessful for him, adding that "the process worked but it didn't translate to vinyl AT ALL.

"[10] Biographer Anthony DeCurtis wrote that "[t]he album's jazz components, and its descent into atmospheric noises and effects, especially on the title track, are part of its intense experimental impulses."

"[5] "City Lights" is a tribute to Charlie Chaplin, sung in a "bass-goon voice"[12] One critic describes Reed's singing as "a muted croak, so deep that it's hardly recognisable.

[5] On the closing title track, notionally inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's poem of the same name,[5] Reed uses a guitar synthesizer while Don Cherry provides free jazz trumpet work.

[8] Some of its lyrics were improvised by Reed in the studio; the musician also asked Cherry to interpolate a portion of Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" (1959) in the song's intro.

"[10] In a 1996 interview with Penman, Reed said that the album's master tapes no longer existed, requiring him to buy a copy from "one of those speciality record stores" and "put it through a computer program" for preservation/remastering.

[7] According to Aiden: "Though not everyone understood or appreciated Reed's foray deeper into jazz- and art-rock, Lester Bangs, despite their fraught history, concluded that his career had finally reached an apotheosis.

"[5] In his contemporary review for Rolling Stone, Bangs wrote, "With The Bells, more than in Street Hassle, perhaps even more than in his work with The Velvet Underground, Lou Reed achieves his oft-stated ambition—to become a great writer, in the literary sense".

"[14] Jon Savage of Melody Maker praised the production and musicianship, though felt Reed's "personal inspiration is drying up" in both the lyrics and music.

He wrote: "He's broken with past tradition by collaborating with rocker Nils Lofgren, free-jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and various band members on the material, but the experiment doesn't work.

The music is positively lethargic and uninspired and the lyrics – while retaining the unflinching emotional honesty of Reed's best work – merely revisit old turf without providing new insights.

"[20] The Rough Guide to Rock contributor Roy Edroso ted that Reed's feud with Arista was reflected in The Bells, an album he deemed to comprise "mostly grooves and riffs built around slabs of inchoate feeling (sometimes effectively, as with the ruined reunion of 'Families').

[16] AllMusic's Mark Deming wrote that The Bells musically represented a slight step back for Reed from the tormented Street Hassle to "the more listener-friendly, keyboard-dominated sound of Rock and Roll Heart", but considered the lyrics to move the singer "away from the boho decadence of most of his 1970s work and toward a more compassionate perspective on his characters".

"[15] In his book The Great Rock Discography, Martin C. Strong said that, following the "tedious" Live: Take No Prisoners (1978), Reed "started to show uncharacteristic signs of maturity in both his music and lyrics" with The Bells and its follow-up Growing Up in Public (1980).

"[23] In The Rolling Stone Album Guide, Hull deemed the record to be "another twist" in Reed's career: "cut with jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, it offered exceptionally dense but not really jazzy music.

"[25] Similarly, in a 2004 Uncut interview, when asked by Jon Wilde which of his albums "are ripe for critical rehabilitation", Reed singled out The Bells for being "one of my favourites.