master magicians practice their alchemy on Harrison's 'Blue Jay Way', recorded perhaps in an Egyptian tomb, and 'I Am The Walrus', a piece of terror lurking in foggy midnight moors. These two songs accomplish what the Stones attempted." Richard Goldstein of The New York Times rued that, more so than Sgt. Pepper, the soundtrack demonstrated the Beatles' departure from true rock values in favour of studio effects, and he found artifice in the "waft of foggy music" accompanying Harrison's declaration that "There's a fog upon LA". Typically of Harrison's recent songs, Goldstein continued, "Blue Jay Way" was "filled with fascinating tones and textures" but the message was confused and laboured, and he complained that it was sung with a vocal that was "[more] sandpaper than Satori". Rex Reed, in a highly unfavourable review of the album for HiFi/Stereo Review, said the song "consists of three minutes and fifty seconds of the Beatles sounding as if they are singing under water or gargling with Listerine" and dismissed it as "boring as hell". By contrast, Robert Christgau wrote in Esquire that, despite three of the new songs being "disappointing", Magical Mystery Tour was "worth buying ... especially for Harrison's hypnotic 'Blue Jay Way. Christgau described the track as "an adaptation of Oriental modes in which everything works, lyrics included". Retrospective assessments A critic of the Beatles' output immediately post-Sgt. Pepper, Ian MacDonald found "Blue Jay Way" "as unfocused and monotonous as most of the group's output of this period", adding that the song "numbingly fails to transcend the weary boredom that inspired it". Writing for Rolling Stone in 2002, Greg Kot considered it to be "one of [Harrison's] least-memorable Beatles tracks … a song essentially about boredom – and it sounds like it". Similarly unimpressed with Magical Mystery Tour, Tim Riley describes "Blue Jay Way" as a song that "goes nowhere tiresomely", with a vocal that "sounds as tired and droning" as the musical accompaniment. In Walter Everett's view, the track's combination of unusual musical scales, reversed tape sounds and imaginative engineering makes it "the most mysterious Beatles sound between 'Strawberry Fields Forever' and 'Glass Onion, but the lyrics are "dull" by comparison. Ian Inglis writes that the emotion Harrison conveys on the track "belies its apparently trivial lyrics" and that, together with the instrumentation and backing vocals, his pleas "create an unusually atmospheric and strangely moving song". Writing for Rough Guides,