Rick Anderson of AllMusic gave the album 3.5 out of 5 stars, writing: "The band's sophomore debut tempts fate with a nearly 30-second fade-in (you may think you have a defective disc on your hands, but wait for it), then takes off into a crazy welter of power ballad, electro-glitch, dubstep, atonal, acoustic-based, waltz-funk weirdness that occasionally gets tiring but rarely stops being interesting." Although feeling that "Ballad of NGB", "Song for the Outsider" and "Junior" should have been separated in the track listing due to their similarities ("mixtures of strings, thudding beats embroidered with clicky and glitchy percussion sounds, and soulful vocals that are sometimes crooned and sometimes only half-sung"), he concluded that "everything else [...] is pretty intensely great."[2]
Mike Diver of BBC Music reviewed the album mostly positively, judging that the album does not "set a tone that's wholly maintained – and that's both the beauty and the irritation of Matilda. It's an album that tries to do too much in too little time, splitting itself into two halves of static'n'bass and strings'n'sighs, the midpoint dividing line a gentle instrumental called (appropriately) 'Red Sea', which loops itself beautifully like a lost passage from the Riceboy Sleeps LP."[3]
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