"Q" praised "Midnite Vultures" as an often "musically dazzling" album, while noting that "the one criticism that can be still levelled at Beck is that his songs remain strangely soulless, failing to ever really grip the emotions or stir the soul." In a mixed review, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic states that while the album's initial songs are "tight, catchy, and memorable, the production dense", the "awkward, misguided shift in tone" of "Hollywood Freaks" gives the rest of the album the impression that "for all the ingenuity, it's just a hipster joke." Robert Christgau of "The Village Voice" felt that "his problem isn't that he tries to be funny, but that his jokes are as forced as his horn charts", later giving it a one-star honorable mention rating and remarking that it "does eventually get funky, if anybody cares but me."