his life from a great, unbridgeable distance. That element of detachment is chilling. To reinforce it, messages of isolation gradually float to the surface of the songs' spare, eloquent melodies." Three years later in the same magazine James Hunter said of the 2003 North American reissue, "The album unleashes a dramatic starkness and some breathtakingly pretty music". AllMusic's Ned Raggett wrote in his retrospective review that "Pink Moon more than anything else is the record that made Drake the cult figure he remains. Specifically, Pink Moon is the bleakest of [all his records]; that the likes of Belle and Sebastian are fans of Drake may be clear enough, but it's doubtful they could ever achieve the calm, focused anguish of this album, as harrowing as it is attractive ... Drake's elegant melancholia avoiding sounding pretentious in the least thanks to his continued embrace of simple, tender vocalizing. Meanwhile, the sheer majesty of his guitar playing – consider the opening notes of 'Road' or 'Parasite' – makes for a breathless wonder to behold." Reviewing Pink Moon as part of the 2014 box set Tuck Box, Jayson Greene of Pitchfork noted, "A 'pink moon' is a baleful symbol, a sign of impending death or calamity ... On paper, this sentiment reads like vindictive rage, but on record, it sounds contemplative. Drake's voice never conveyed palpable anger or sadness; he had a slight, gentle voice and upper-class accent, the product of his upbringing, clipped and clean, and his guitar, as always, rang out with a crystalline purity. His music is so consoling that the darkness at its heart is not always accessible. It's almost impossible to hear the emotional abandon in Pink Moon, then, without the taste of his first two albums lingering on your mouth. It's only then that the bone-dry resonance of the guitars registers as slightly alarming, and the backdrop of silence suggests both the purity of Drake's vision and also something darker: like someone who has dropped out of the world, mumbling prophecies ... There is a stillness to Nick Drake's music that bewitches anyone who gets near enough, and Pink Moon is its purest expression. It remains the Nick Drake record most people begin with, and for good reason." Accolades Pink Moon was voted number 131 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000). In 2003, the album was ranked number 320 on