He singled out the "riff-happy" songs "Start Choppin" and "I Ain't Sayin" as "excellent" (calling the latter "a two-minute gem") and praised Mascis' production choices ("he embellishes the band’s usual all-guitar palette with timpani, chimes and strings") as "a daring move in the sadly conformist world of alternative rock".

"[6] Robert Christgau was less positive, finding that "somehow his axe and his voice sing the same tune, momentarily transmuting his self-pity into simple sadness".

[15] Prefix magazine's Matthew Flander described it as "a classic record from the band, capturing just about every great ’90s song they had aside from “The Wagon” and “Feel the Pain”."

"There was something unabashedly classic about Where You Been’s rock," she writes, "deriving not least from Mascis’s copious guitar heroics, layering multiple tracks of scree and howl so the entire album feels like one epic, sky-scraping solo.

[...] With his fondness for extended guitar-play, his country-soaked rock crunch, his cracked and sweet vocals, Where You Been identified Mascis as hewn from the same stone as Neil Young before him.

Club's Noel Murray wrote that "Dinosaur Jr. wasn’t the most unlikely band to make the jump to a major label in the ’90s (the post-Nirvana era was a weird time), but few could’ve guessed that Mascis’ group would actually sell a respectable amount of records, without substantially altering its style.

He wrote that the song "I Ain't Sayin", with "its canyon-filling bookending riff to its appealing shuffle and its heartwarming “rolling home to you” chorus [...] is a crowd-pleaser that could’ve been Dinosaur Jr.’s biggest hit if it’d been pushed a little harder—or at all.

She called both the releases "cornerstones" to the aforementioned movement, writing however that "unless you're jonesin' for reliving that period again, it's fair to say in today's world they're not much else.

"[19] "In addition to succeeding in its bid to pluck up some post-‘Lithium' plaid-clad grunge fans," writes Josh Gray of Clash "'Where You Been?

'Goin' Home's gentle world-weariness sounds for all the world like it could be an Eels rip-off if it weren’t for the fact that E was still just a bespectacled teenager who was into birds at this point.

"[21] The Felled Trees Collective, consisting of members from Thrice, Samiam and No Motiv (also featuring appearances from Texas Is the Reason, Knapsack, Beat Union and numerous other bands), covered the album in its entirety on its 20th anniversary.