Entertainment Weekly noted that despite their commercial success, Poison lacked respect from music critics who damned their music as "hard-rock candy", and characterized the "harder and more realistic"
Flesh & Blood as an attempt to address this, balancing more typical hard rock topics like liberation and sex with more thoughtful subjects. He further panned Fairbairn's "stale air" production for recalling the 'slushy' sound of his late 1980s albums with
Aerosmith, adding: "The guy's got no use for rhythm sections, and his aesthetic hearkens closer to
Days of Future Passed than to
Toys in the Attic", which for "concise
4/4 hook-and-riff bands" like Poison is unhelpful. He further deemed
Flesh & Blood "the Poison CD for suckers who think
Pump was good Aerosmith." In the United Kingdom, where the album reached number three and "Unskinny Bop" was a top 20 hit, both achievements coming ahead of their British concert (at
Castle Donington), Paul Sexton of
Select wrote that
Flesh & Blood "abounds with anthemic rockist singalongs" on the subjects of sex and the rock band lifestyle, but adds that they can "pull in other directions", noting the themes of disillusion and ideological unclarity on "Life Loves a Tragedy" and "Something to Believe In", respectively, as well as musical detours such as the minute-long,
New Orleans-style
slide guitar instrumental "Swamp Juice" and the
rootsy "Poor Boy Blues". The Stud Brothers dismissed
Flesh & Blood in their
Melody Maker review, deeming it "the most hatefully hackneyed and infuriatingly pedestrian collection of songs you're likely to hear this or any other year", writing that the "matey asides" punctuating the songs and "mannered idiosyncrasies" are unsuccessful in elevating the quality. They wrote the band omit references to debauchery, decadence or anything "even vaguely interesting", with stomping choruses being most important to the band, opining that "the words, really just the songtitles, are there simply to be shouted." Among retrospective reviews,
AllMusic's Steve Huey wrote that Poison "made a bid to be taken seriously" following the critical panning of the best-selling
Open Up and Say...Ahh! (1988), adding: "Even the title of
Flesh & Blood indicates a desire for more substance and reality in their music, as do darker songs [on the album]". Huey believed it occasionally works successfully, aided by the band's consistent songwriting and "wider musical range that occasionally veers into swampy
blues-rock", but that at other times, Michaels seems "too self-consciously proud of his own ambition to recognize when he oversteps his bounds". In
The Virgin Encyclopedia of Heavy Rock (1997),
Colin Larkin wrote that, by
Flesh & Blood, Poison had dramatically toned down their 'glam band' image and make-up wearing. ==Accolades==