band itself had helped popularize". Among the contemporary reviews of the album, Beat Instrumental described "It's All Too Much" and "Only a Northern Song" as "superb pieces" that "redeem" side one. Record Mirrors reviewer said that it was the best-sounding track on Yellow Submarine, adding: "Beside the beauty of the organ, the absolute volume of it – even when the [record] player is turned down – is amazing. The song is basically of rock construction, but built around one endless note which trails behind." In his lengthy assessment of the track, Barry Miles of International Times wrote: "Endless, mantric, a round, interwoven, trellised, tessellated, filigreed, gidouiled, spiralling is It's All Too Much [–] George's Indian-timed, with drums fading-in-and-out, spurts of life to a decaying note, multi-level, handclapping number ... High treble notes flicker like moths around the top register. Happy singalong music." In his 1998 book The Beatles Diary, Miles praised it further as "the most striking piece of psychedelia The Beatles ever recorded" and concluded: "Discordant, off-beat and effortlessly brilliant, the song was (alongside 'Taxman') Harrison's finest piece of Western rock music to date." Retrospective assessments and legacy Although Yellow Submarine has attained the status of a classic children's animated film, many Beatles biographers consider the band's post-Sgt. Pepper 1967 recordings to be substandard work. Among these authors, Mark Hertsgaard cites Martin's view that the soundtrack album was made up of "bottom of the barrel" material and dismisses "It's All Too Much" as "little more than formless shrieking". Ian MacDonald also holds the track in low regard, describing it as a "protracted exercise in drug-mesmerised G-pedal monotony". Discussing the lyrics, particularly the line "Show me that I'm everywhere, and get me home for tea", MacDonald considers the song to be "the locus classicus of English psychedelia" and he comments that in Britain, unlike in America, "tradition, nature, and the child's-eye-view were the things which sprang most readily to the LSD-heightened Anglo-Saxon mind." Author and journalist Graham Reid highlights the same line as being the British equivalent of "Tune in, turn on, drop out", the phrase coined by Timothy Leary that came to define the American psychedelic experience. Writing for Rolling Stone in 2002, Greg Kot admired the song, saying: "once again, a raga-flavored groove brings out Harrison's best in the walloping 'It's All Too Much.'" That same year, Nigel Williamson of Uncut described it as "a psychedelic classic" that,