In a more positive assessment, for "Creem" magazine, Mitchell Cohen highlighted the album's second side as "a collection of McCartney performances that string together like abbey roadwork", and praised McCartney's vocals relative to his past work, writing: "all of the current tracks are terser, sung better, have less of what I suppose would be called the recording artist's equivalent of camera consciousness." To "NME" critic Bob Woffinden, the attempt at an album-wide concept was "a pretty half-baked one" and Hipgnosis' cover photo was "easily the album's strongest point". While identifying the songs as "particularly weak lyrically", Woffinden concluded: "It was the familiar McCartney problem. He had every essential creative requirement, except the discipline required to knead the parts into a perfect whole."