their relying less on the studio tricks of those earlier works. In The Sunday Times, Derek Jewell hailed it as "the best thing in pop since Sgt. Pepper" and concluded: "Musically, there is beauty, horror, surprise, chaos, order. And that is the world; and that is what The Beatles are on about. Created by, creating for, their age." Although he dismissed "Revolution 9" as a "pretentious" example of "idiot immaturity", the NMEs Alan Smith declared "God Bless You, Beatles!" to the majority of the album. Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone called it "the history and synthesis of Western music", and the group's best album yet. Wenner contended that they were allowed to appropriate other styles and traditions into rock music because their ability and identity were "so strong that they make it uniquely theirs, and uniquely the Beatles. They are so good that they not only expand the idiom, but they are also able to penetrate it and take it further." Among the less favourable critiques, Time magazine's reviewer wrote that The Beatles showcased the "best abilities and worst tendencies" of the Beatles, as it is skilfully performed and sophisticated, but lacks a "sense of taste and purpose". William Mann of The Times opined that, in their over-reliance on pastiche and "private jokes", Lennon and McCartney had ceased to progress as songwriters, yet he deemed the release to be "The most important musical event of the year" and acknowledged: "these 30 tracks contain plenty to be studied, enjoyed and gradually appreciated more fully in the coming months." In his review for The New York Times, Nik Cohn considered the album "boring beyond belief" and said that over half of its songs were "profound mediocrities". In a 1971 column, Robert Christgau of The Village Voice described the album as both "their most consistent and probably their worst", and referred to its songs as a "pastiche of musical exercises". Nonetheless, he ranked it as the tenth best album of 1968 in his ballot for Jazz & Pop magazine's annual critics poll. Retrospective assessments In a 2003 appraisal of the album, for Mojo magazine, Ian MacDonald wrote that The Beatles regularly appears among the top 10 in critics' "best albums of all time" lists, yet it was a work that he deemed "eccentric, highly diverse, and very variable [in] quality". Rob Sheffield, writing in The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), said that its