In The New York Times, Don Heckman deemed the album "a release that shouldn't be missed" and outlined his "complex" reaction to being presented with a sequence of Harrison songs for the first time: "amazement at the range of Harrison's talents; fascination at the effects of Phil Spector's participation as the album's producer; curiosity about the many messages that waft through the Harrison songs". John Gabree of High Fidelity described it as "the big album of the year" and a "unified yet tremendously varied" work. In response to rumours that the Beatles were due to reunite, Gabree said that, on the strength of the Harrison and Lennon solo albums, "I, for one, don't care if they ever do." Retrospective assessments An album that sounded contemporary in 1970 was viewed as dated and faddish later in the decade. Village Voice critic Robert Christgau, having bemoaned in 1971 that it was characterised by "overblown fatuity" and uninteresting music, wrote in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981) of the album's "featurelessness", "right down to the anonymity of the multitracked vocals". In their book The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, Roy Carr and Tony Tyler were likewise lukewarm in their assessment, criticising the "homogeneity" of the production and "the lugubrious nature of Harrison's composing". Writing in The Beatles Forever in 1977, however, Nicholas Schaffner praised the album as the "crowning glory" of Harrison's and Spector's careers, and highlighted "All Things Must Pass" and "Beware of Darkness" as the "two most eloquent songs ... musically as well as lyrically". AllMusic's Richie Unterberger views All Things Must Pass as "[Harrison's] best ... a very moving work", and Roger Catlin of MusicHound describes the set as "epic and audacious", its "dense production and rich songs topped off by the extra album of jamming". Unterberger has also written that while the Beatles' break-up remains a source of sorrow for many listeners, "it's impossible not to rejoice in George's greatest triumph" and that, as further evidenced in the bootlegs of outtakes from the sessions, Lennon, McCartney and Beatles producer George Martin undervalued not just Harrison's songwriting abilities but also his talent as a producer. Q magazine considers the album to be an exemplary fusion of "rock and religion", as well as "the single most satisfying collection of any solo Beatle". Filmmaker Martin Scorsese has written of the "powerful sense of the ritualistic on the album", adding: "I