member about $100,000. Moulding intimated: "It annoyed me that we weren't getting anywhere with Andy because we could all see he'd got over his stage fright problem. Now he was just making excuses." Critical reception Contemporary Oranges & Lemons was met with critical acclaim. A reviewer for CMJ New Music Monthly declared it to be another album of the band's "ever-winning, ever-esoteric pop" and "as good as any in their catalogue," highlighting "Mayor of Simpleton", "The Loving", "Merely a Man", and "King for a Day" as its best tracks. Chris Heim of the Chicago Tribune praised the album as a "refreshingly tart and wondrously rich harvest of intelligent and challenging pop". "The Loving" was voted NMEs "Single of the Week" by guest reviewers the Wonder Stuff, a British band. Writing for Rolling Stone, Michael Azerrad dubbed the LP "ambitious" and "ultimately delightful". He acknowledged that first-time listeners may be "overwhelmed by the densely layered arrangements and center-stage percussion. But on repeated listenings, the curtains part and hooks are all you hear". Richard Walls of High Fidelity opined: "It's possible for [the album] to charm you into thinking it's a lightheartedly benign bauble. The components of the disc's well-crafted and pleasurable surface ... all conspire to elicit a smiling response." Brent Milano of Pulse! stated: "we can't imagine anyone not liking [this record], unless you've got a real problem with brilliant songwriting, personal-yet-universal lyrics, great singing and nifty guitar sounds. XTC can absorb '60s tricks as well as anyone ... but it doesn't stop there. There weren't many '60s bands who worked tributes to King Sunny Ade and Ladysmith Black Mambazo into a straightahead pop song" ("Hold Me My Daddy"). Robert Sandall of Q believed that the group were "obsessed" with the Beatles, specifically Paul McCartney circa 1967–1968. He concluded that the music was "Exuberantly catchy ... and mercifully free of that whiff of self-conscious art school cleverness which has blighted XTC in the past, these songs are thrilling before you catch their sophistication." The Washington Posts Geoffrey Himes praised the record as proof "that McCartney's psychedelic pop was not just a product of a particular time, but rather a set of possibilities that have hardly been exhausted". Michael Small of People compared it favourably to the Beatles' White Album: "Almost every song contains at least one catchy pop riff or chorus. Then those bright tunes abruptly shift into minor keys