heard in years, and I don't recommend it to anyone." He suggested that in the year 2084, XTC would be as widely acclaimed as the Beatles. Writing for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau awarded the album a B score and recommended that the group write a musical, "Which would keep them working at the proper scale and be the best thing for steam-powered trains since Ray Davies." Bernward Meier of the German Musik Express awarded the album a perfect score and praised the music as a skillful balance between children's songs, "hard blues", syncopated melodies and psychedelia, highlighting "This World Over" as its "most beautiful" song. In the magazine Smash Hits, guest writer Morrissey penned a review of the follow-up single, "This World Over", that stated "XTC have stepped back from music industry machinations and are making better records." Erica Wexler, then a reviewer for Musician magazine, suggested that "XTC is never short of ideas; their only real flaw is a propensity for crowding together too many. But in this day of pop cliché, I'd take XTC's senses-working-overtime anytime. I just hope they're still not too far ahead of their time." In 1987, musician and writer Dave Bidini dubbed it perhaps "XTC's most humorless album - a sort of no-fun answer to the half-serious question asked on English Settlement. ... Colin Moulding gets philosophy-weird and Andy Partridge sounds depressed; the direction of the band seems blurred." Retrospective In later years, Partridge said "I love that album and nobody ever mentions it. That and Mummer are the two ignored discs." Moulding viewed the album less favourably. According to a Mojo journalist, the tedium of programming the LinnDrum patterns "sapped Colin and Dave's enthusiasm and it was years before Dave could bear to listen to the elaborately noisy result." Gregory recalled that his immediate reaction to hearing "Smalltown" decades later was "Damn, this needs mixing!" He explained: "There is a lot of musical and verbal detail in the track, though much of it is buried and blurred, creating a flat, un-dynamic listening experience." Reviewing The Big Express for AllMusic, Chris Woodstra said that XTC created "their most painstakingly detailed, multi-layered, sonically dynamic" work to that point, resulting in "a thoroughly consistent and enjoyable album beginning to end." He also lamented that the 1986 follow-up Skylarking "gets much more glory" whereas "this one was virtually ignored". Dave Jennings of Louder Than War dubbed