make the album a worthwhile purchase for Kinks fans. The reviewer negatively compared it to Reprise's 1972 compilation, The Kink Kronikles, writing that while both albums seemed similarly intentioned, The Great Lost Kinks Album "lacks both the bountifulness and dramatic highlights [of Kronikles]". Another magazine's reviewer wrote that the album's main value was for Kink fans who "don't mind wading through second-rate material to get to the occasional highspots." Writing for Rolling Stone magazine, Jim Miller says the album "basically represents dregs", while providing "a surprising number of undeservedly esoteric Kinks classics" that would satisfy fans unhappy with Davies and the Kinks' recent work. In Circus magazine, Ed Naha wrote that the album captures the band during their mid- to late 1960s peak, and that while it is generally not on the level of the band's best work, such as "Waterloo Sunset" (1967) or "Lola" (1970), its contents provides great insight into Davies. The Los Angeles Times critic Terry Atkinson mentioned the same songs and "Victoria" (1969), writing that where The Kink Kronikles contained classics, the songs on The Great Lost Kinks Album are instead "trifling", while still better than the Kinks' most recent releases on RCA. Several reviewers took notice of the Mendelsohn's liner notes and his criticism of the Kinks' contemporary work. Chuck Lowery of the newspaper The San Diego Door writes that The Great Lost Kinks Album is "really good", but considers it lesser than the band's 1972 album, Everybody's in Show-Biz, writing that Mendelsohn's attack on that album discredits his own writing. In his review of the album for Creem magazine, Ken Emerson characterised Mendelsohn's liner notes as querulous. In contrast to other reviewers, Emerson found the album a "marvelously" coherent package, evoking the same sadness heard on most of the Kinks' albums since 1966, with the happy songs instead "wistful thinking, pathetically evanescent fantasies." In a May 1974 interview with Circus, musician Lou Reed declared his love for the album and said he listened it any chance he could. Retrospective assessment Among retrospective reviewers, Robert Christgau declared that though the album consists mostly of B-sides and outtakes, it is the Kinks' best album to be released in the 1970s, something he thinks speaks to "the limitations of the Kinks' professional renaissance". He writes the album's "[f]ragile, unkempt, [and] whimsical" content focuses on the "harmless eccentrics" which made up Davies' best songwriting. Richie Unterberger of AllMusic