weeks at number one on the Billboard Top LPs chart. It was the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM) best-selling album of 1969. In Japan, it was one of the longest-charting albums to date, remaining in the top 100 for 298 weeks during the 1970s. Critical reception Contemporary Abbey Road initially received mixed reviews from music critics, who criticised the production's artificial sounds and viewed its music as inauthentic. William Mann of The Times said that the album will "be called gimmicky by people who want a record to sound exactly like a live performance", although he considered it to be "teem[ing] with musical invention" and added: "Nice as 'Come Together' and Harrison's 'Something' are – they are minor pleasures in the context of the whole disc ... Side Two is marvellous ..." Ed Ward of Rolling Stone called the album "complicated instead of complex" and felt that the Moog synthesizer "disembodies and artificializes" the band's sound, adding that they "create a sound that could not possibly exist outside the studio". While he found the medley on side two to be their "most impressive music" since Rubber Soul, Nik Cohn of The New York Times said that, "individually", the album's songs are "nothing special". Albert Goldman of Life magazine wrote that Abbey Road "is not one of the Beatles' great albums" and, despite some "lovely" phrases and "stirring" segues, side two's suite "seems symbolic of the Beatles' latest phase, which might be described as the round-the-clock production of disposable music effects". Conversely, Chris Welch wrote in Melody Maker: "the truth is, their latest LP is just a natural born gas, entirely free of pretension, deep meanings or symbolism ... While production is simple compared to past intricacies, it is still extremely sophisticated and inventive." Derek Jewell of The Sunday Times found the album "refreshingly terse and unpretentious", and although he lamented the band's "cod-1920s jokes (Maxwell's Silver Hammer) and ... Ringo's obligatory nursery arias (Octopus's Garden)", he considered that Abbey Road "touches higher peaks than did their last album". John Mendelsohn, writing for Rolling Stone, called it "breathtakingly recorded" and praised side two especially, equating it to "the whole of Sgt. Pepper" and stating, "That the Beatles can unify seemingly countless musical fragments and lyrical doodlings into a uniformly wonderful suite ... seems potent testimony that no, they've far from lost it, and no, they haven't stopped trying." While covering