"Rolling Stone"s Arthur Schmidt judged the song to have lived up to its legend, although its placement on the record gave "something of the effect of Brian saying: 'Oh yeah, that’s our new album, but hey, you wanna hear something we had left over around here?'" He added that while it "would have more than given a run to anything on "Sergeant Pepper"", the song was "dazzling" to a fault. Geoffrey Cannon of "The Guardian" opined that Parks' lyrics were "pretentious", but compared the song favorably to "You Still Believe in Me" and "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" from "Pet Sounds": "Its subtle shifts of pace and timing, and delicate harmony singing, put it in the top flight of Beach Boys' numbers."