two songs to a Beatles album; in author Robert Rodriguez's description, critics' attention was now centred on "a major talent unleashed, one who'd been hidden in plain sight all those years" behind Lennon and McCartney. "That the Quiet Beatle was capable of such range", Rodriguez continues, "from the joyful 'What Is Life' to the meditative 'Isn't It a Pity' to the steamrolling 'Art of Dying' to the playful 'I Dig Love' – was revelatory." Most reviewers tended to discount the third disc of studio jams, accepting that it was a "free" addition to justify the set's high retail price, although Anthony DeCurtis recognises Apple Jam as further evidence of the album's "bracing air of creative liberation". Ben Gerson of Rolling Stone deemed All Things Must Pass "both an intensely personal statement and a grandiose gesture, a triumph over artistic modesty" and referenced the three-record set as an "extravaganza of piety and sacrifice and joy, whose sheer magnitude and ambition may dub it the War and Peace of rock 'n' roll". Gerson also lauded the album's production as being "of classic Spectorian proportions, Wagnerian, Brucknerian, the music of mountain tops and vast horizons". In the NME, Alan Smith referred to Harrison's songs as "music of the mind", adding: "they search and they wander, as if in the soft rhythms of a dream, and in the end he has set them to words which are often both profound and profoundly beautiful." Billboards reviewer hailed All Things Must Pass as "a masterful blend of rock and piety, technical brilliance and mystic mood, and relief from the tedium of everyday rock". Melody Makers Richard Williams summed up the surprise many felt at Harrison's apparent transformation: All Things Must Pass, he said, provided "the rock equivalent of the shock felt by pre-war moviegoers when Garbo first opened her mouth in a talkie: Garbo talks! – Harrison is free!" In another review, for The Times, Williams opined that, of all the Beatles' solo releases thus far, Harrison's album "makes far and away the best listening, perhaps because it is the one which most nearly continues the tradition they began eight years ago". William Bender of Time magazine described it as an "expressive, classically executed personal statement ... one of the outstanding rock albums in years", while Tom Zito of The Washington Post predicted that it would influence the discourse on "the [real] genius behind the Beatles".