Where the latter opened with the shattering paramilitary drumbeat of 'Sunday Bloody Sunday',... Fire launches into the long shimmer of 'A Sort Of Homecoming,' whose sort-of-mystical lyric adorns the romantic maroon-and-gold sleeve. The fact is, if you bring your established conception of U2 to this record, you'll be disappointed." Kurt Loder was more critical in Rolling Stone: "U2 flickers and nearly fades, its fire banked by a misconceived production strategy and occasional interludes of soggy, songless self-indulgence. This is not a 'bad' album, but neither is it the irrefutable beauty the band's fans anticipated." The Village Voice critic Robert Christgau felt Bono's moralizing and "wild romantic idealism" proved careless, specifically on "Pride" and "Elvis Presley and America", but concluded that those qualities work well enough for him throughout the rest of the album "to make a skeptic believe temporarily in miracles". At the end of 1984, it was voted the 29th best record of the year in the Pazz & Jop, an annual poll of American critics published in The Village Voice. Retrospectively, Bill Graham of Hot Press wrote in 1996 that The Unforgettable Fire was U2's most pivotal album and that it was "their coming of age that saved their lives as a creative unit." Niall Stokes, also of Hot Press, said that "one or two tracks were undercooked" due to the deadline crush but that it was the group's "first album with a cohesive sound" on which "U2 were reborn". By contrast, it was also included in the 1991 book The Worst Rock and Roll Records of All Time. In 2009, reviewing the album's deluxe edition, Will Hermes of Rolling Stone dubbed the album a "transitional, hit-or-miss set", but noted, "When things click, it bridges [War]s fight-the-power arena rock with the texture fetishism of... The Joshua Tree." Ryan Dombal of Pitchfork praised The Unforgettable Fire as "a transitional album of the highest magnitude" which "ebbs and flows along the spectrum between the spiky, post-punk U2 of old and the impressionistic, Eno-assisted U2 they were yearning to become." Touring In support of the album, the band embarked on a worldwide concert tour, the Unforgettable Fire Tour, which saw U2 shows moving into indoor arenas in the United States. Consisting of six legs and 112 shows, the tour commenced in New Zealand in August 1984 where translating the elaborate and complex textures of the new studio-recorded tracks to live performance