ensure liveliness" with melodies that showcase the album's complex nature. CMJ New Music Report Amy Sciarretto wrote the band sound like a mix of Face to Face, Metallica and Thursday "somehow manag[ing] to pull the feat off—without resulting in an unlistenable mess of music". Billboard reviewer Bram Teitelman expressed a similar opinion, saying the album "at times sounds like Iron Maiden, Bad Religion and Rush jamming (which sounds a lot better on disc than it looks on paper)". Belfast Telegraph writer Neil McKay remarked that the band "ticks all the right boxes for energy and noise, [but] it's too generic to be memorable". John Wiederhorn of Blender wrote; "[s]omehow, all these stylistic variations don’t disrupt the music’s flow, which rocks as hard as it aches". Rolling Stone writer Marie Elsie St. Leger said while the rest of the band "ably create a close facsimile of existential rage", Kensrue's words, which are "sharp, sometime political ... and even allegorical", typically get "lost in the screams". Commercial performance and legacy Prior to release, 100,000 copies of The Artist in the Ambulance had been shipped to stores; it sold 47,500 copies in its first week of release. By July 2006, it had sold 391,000 copies in the US. The album peaked at number 16 on the Billboard 200 chart, making it their first album to do so. It topped the Top Internet Albums chart. The album reached number nine on the UK Rock Albums Chart. "All That's Left" peaked at number 24 on Alternative Airplay, number 36 on Mainstream Rock Airplay and number 37 on Active Rock. "Stare at the Sun" peaked at number 39 on Alternative Airplay. In a 2007 interview, Riley Breckenridge said the label pushed to make Thrice and Thursday "the next grunge [movement] or whatever we were supposed to become. It just did not work". Orange County Register ranked The Artist in the Ambulance at number five on their list of the "10 best albums of the ’00s". NME included the album on their list of the "20 Emo Albums That Have Resolutely Stood The Test Of Time". Rock Sound ranked it at number 25 on their list of "modern classics", stating that it was "their first classic, introducing themselves to the world at large with a brand of unique post-hardcore that is still to be bettered". The Color Morale covered "Stare at the Sun" for their EP Artist