Founding David Pearce has described the album's music "rural psychedelia", which was also an alternate title for the album. Kieron Tyler of The Arts Desk found that the album exemplified the more "diffuse" direction that shoegazing music had taken by 1993, after the genre's initial wave of popularity. AllMusic editor Ned Raggett placed the album in the context of its contemporaneous scene, writing that it "crystallized an incipient 1990s underground as in thrall to folk music as to feedback blasts and Krautrock influences." Record Collector critic Mike Goldsmith also heard influences of "jazz, noise and Kiwi indie" in the music. "If any one thing could be singled out about the album," Raggett writes, "it's the continual contrast between Pearce's soft, reflective singing, often sunk deep into the overall mix and treated with heavy-duty echo, and his often tremendous guitar work, electric squalls, and drones piled atop one another." He noted the "initial comparisons" made to My Bloody Valentine, but found them to be "misplaced – it's a consciously different style employing some similar elements, but with notably varying results."
