| last = Soderberg | first = Brandon | url = https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15992-james-ferraro-far-side-virtual/ | title = James Ferraro: Far Side Virtual | publisher =
Pitchfork Media | date = November 4, 2011 | access-date = March 10, 2013}} | last = Wharton | first = Stefan | url = http://www.tinymixtapes.com/music-review/james-ferraro-far-side-virtual | title = James Ferraro: Far Side Virtual | publisher =
Tiny Mix Tapes | access-date = March 10, 2013}} }}
Far Side Virtual was met with greater critical attention than Ferraro's previous releases. Just over a year after its release, Marc Masters at
Pitchfork wrote that
Far Side Virtual "became Ferraro's most discussed and divisive effort, landing on year-end best-of lists as often as it got dismissed as a joke." At
Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 77, which indicates "generally favorable reviews", based on seven reviews. Critics tended to agree that
Far Side Virtual takes the state of 21st-century
consumerism as its subject, but there was no consensus regarding whether Ferraro intended to satirize, criticize or embrace this condition. Brandon Soderberg said that the album's concept "seemed critic-proof, which was frustrating ... Negative reviews could be dismissed as the listeners simply not getting the joke." Stefan Wharton of
Tiny Mix Tapes took the album as a statement about blurred boundaries between consumers and their technologies, citing the writing of
Markus Giesler as a precedent: "
Far Side Virtual succeeds in exciting the collective memory of that generation now so conjoined to its technological appendages."
Accolades Far Side Virtual appeared on several "best of 2011" lists and features. In Tiny Mix Tapes' end-of-year wrap-up column on nostalgia in pop music, Jonathan Dean wrote, "You may want to throw
Far Side Virtual against a wall upon hearing its relentlessly arch, kitschy blandness, but it manages to successfully turn pop against itself, which, like it or not, is a politically progressive project. Its pure, bold conceptualism stood out in a year that was dominated by the 'febrile sterility' of post-internet microgenres and tail-swallowing postmodernism." Music critic Jonah Weiner cited
Far Side Virtual for his end-of-year article on contemporary
protest songs, and called it "antagonizingly, alienatingly,
wondrously bland."
Fact named Hippos in Tanks the best label of the year, listing the signing of Ferraro and subsequent release of
Far Side Virtual as one of its finest accomplishments. Tiny Mix Tapes named
Far Side Virtual the 21st best album of the year, summarized it as "hyperreal... frivolous... eerily familiar and scarily comfortable: pop structures moving one step closer toward the 'synthetic music box' from
Huxley's
Brave New World."
Fact named it the sixth best album of the year, and called it "[t]he finest, most accessible example yet of James Ferraro's ability to turn the detritus and dreck of US pop/commercial culture into gold – or, at any rate, something stomach-turningly psychedelic, mentally disturbing yet oddly celebratory."
Dummy named the album one of its "12 albums for 2011", and Ruth Saxelby concluded that Ferraro "neither celebrates nor critiques the internet's reign but simply observes it with deep fascination.
Andy Warhol style, it reflects the ambiguity of consumer culture in the digital age back at us with a Pixar-animated wink." The album was placed at number 316 on
The Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll, with votes from four critics.
Far Side Virtual topped
The Wires top 50 releases of 2011, a choice that proved to be polarizing among readers. Tiny Mix Tapes' Dean wrote that after
Far Side Virtual topped
The Wires list, "discerning music nerds have felt the imperative to step to either side of a line," and that Herrington's column "amounted to a retraction." While praising the magazine for its diverse taste,
Seattle Weeklys Eric Grandy jokingly commented that it was "no surprise" that the "willfully obscurantist" magazine would top their list with a "winking
Windows '97
soft-rock hellscape". ==Track listing==