album's second side weaker than its first, due to the band inflicting "discipline into Bowie's writing and performance". Another reviewer, Dave Marsh, gave Low two stars out of five, finding a lack of "thought" and "real songs", calling the majority of side two "as limpid as the worst movie soundtrack". He ultimately found the record a new low point for the artist. A reviewer for Record Mirror found the album boring at first listen, and upon repeated listens, felt Bowie had hit an "all time low", releasing an album that lacks a "genuine vision" with in cohesive music and few lyrics. NMEs Charles Shaar Murray gave the album an extremely negative assessment, describing it as "a state of mind beyond desperation". He felt that the record encouraged the listener to feel down and offered no help in getting back up, stating, "It's an act of purest hatred and destructiveness. It comes to us in a bad time and it doesn't help at all." Murray ultimately asked, "Who needs this shit?" In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau found side one's seven "fragments" to be "almost as powerful as the 'overlong' tracks on Station to Station", but described "the movie music on side two" as banal. He revised his opinion on the second side after the release of "Heroes", writing that Low "now seems quite pop, slick and to the point even when the point is background noise". Christgau included it at number 26 on his "dean's list" of the year's best albums for the 1977 Pazz & Jop critics poll. Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn found some of the album as "striking" and "satisfying" as Ziggy but felt the rest lacked mass appeal. Robin Denslow agreed, calling Low Bowie's "least commercial" yet "most experimental" work yet in The Guardian. Other reviewers praised the record. NMEs Ian MacDonald found Low "stunningly beautiful [...] the sound of Sinatra reproduced by Martian computers". He considered it a conceptual sequel to Station to Station and concluded that Low is "the ONLY contemporary rock album". Michael Watts of Melody Maker called it "the music of Now", praising the album as feeling "right for the times", despite its lack of popularity. A reviewer for Billboard described the second side as "adventurous" with an appeal that was as yet uncertain, while Canadian critic Dave Winnitowy found Low "hideously interesting". Though John Rockwell of The New York Times