Waller gave the album four and a half stars out of five and said that compared with their debut, "Tears for Fears have lovingly crafted a new masterpiece with softer, smoky vocals, more tempting melodies and less abrasive rhythms". He called the record "glorious pop" and that "within accepted confines, Tears for Fears are stretching and growing, expanding both their imagination and their horizons". Ian Cranna of Smash Hits described the album as "looser, more exploratory" than the band's previous work and praised its "unflinching lyrical honesty". Rolling Stone reviewer Don Shewey found Tears for Fears reminiscent of various other acts, noting traces of "U2's social conscience, the Bunnymen's echoing guitars and XTC's contorted pop wit" in the album's music, but commented that Chris Hughes' "sparkling" production "nudges Songs from the Big Chair slightly ahead of the pack". Robert Christgau was less enthusiastic in his review for The Village Voice, observing some substantial lyrics, particularly on "The Working Hour", and musical elements such as an "uncommon command of guitar and piano, Baker Street sax, synthesizers more jagged than is deemed mete by the arbiters of dance-pop accessibility". However, he felt these are all beneath a prevailing "portentous" mood suggesting "a depth and drama English lads have been falling short on since the dawn of progressive rock". In NME Danny Kelly called Songs from the Big Chair "a calculated and brilliant peak, a quintessence of polished pop putty ... perfect at its shimmering surface, worthless to its craven core". He described it as a descendant of 10cc's The Original Soundtrack (1975) and Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) – "a product of obsessional care and attention to (often unnecessary) detail". In a retrospective review for AllMusic, Stanton Swihart wrote that Songs from the Big Chair "heralded a dramatic maturation in the band's music, away from the synth-pop brand with which it was (unjustly) seared following the debut, and towards a complex, enveloping pop sophistication", deeming it "one of the finest statements of the decade." Mark Elliott of Record Collector said that the album found Tears for Fears "making it big, coating their consistently interesting material in a high-gloss commercial sheen that captured the mid-80s zeitgeist perfectly", while Q highlighted its "sound of spotlit, spacious sophistication plus anthemic choruses you'd bet your house on." Writing for Stylus Magazine in 2006, Andrew Unterberger concluded that "even today, when all rock