this was, McCartney was to sink lower before rescuing his credibility late in 1973." His fellow ex-Beatles, all of whom were riding high in critical favour with their recent releases, were likewise vocal in their negativity. Lennon hated the album, dismissing his former songwriting partner's efforts as "muzak to my ears" in his song "How Do You Sleep?" Starr told the UK's Melody Maker: "I feel sad about Paul's albums ... I don't think there's one [good] tune on the last one, Ram ... he seems to be going strange." In addition to conducting a war of words in the British music press, "Crippled Inside", another track on Lennon's Imagine album, was also thought to be directed at McCartney. Early editions of Imagine included a postcard of Lennon pulling the ears of a pig in a parody of Rams cover photograph of McCartney holding a ram by the horns. Retrospect The 2012 reissue of Ram received an aggregate score of 86 out of 100 from Metacritic, based on twelve reviews – a score that the website defines as indicating "universal acclaim". Reviewing this issue, Mojo said that "today it sounds quintessentially McCartney". AllMusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote: "in retrospect it looks like nothing so much as the first indie pop album, a record that celebrates small pleasures with big melodies". Pitchforks Jayson Greene similarly felt McCartney was "inventing an approach to pop music that would eventually become someone else's indie pop," and called Ram "a domestic-bliss album, one of the weirdest, earthiest, and most honest ever made". Simon Vozick-Levinson of Rolling Stone dubbed it a "daffy masterpiece" and "a grand psychedelic ramble full of divine melodies and orchestral frippery". David Quantick of Uncut felt that, although it is not as "legendary" as publicised, the album is "occasionally brilliant and historically fascinating" as "post-Beatles mish-mash". Steven Hyden, writing for The A.V. Club, said that the "lightweight" style that was originally panned by critics is "actually (when heard with sympathetic ears) a big part of what makes it so appealing". However, Q magazine still found Ram to be "frustratingly uneven". In a retrospective review in 1981, Robert Christgau panned McCartney's songs as pretentious "crotchets ... so lightweight they float away even as Paulie layers them down with caprices". Reissues In 1977, McCartney supervised the release of an instrumental interpretation of Ram (recorded in June 1971 and arranged by Richard Hewson) with