Upon its release,
Ram was panned by
music critics. McCartney was particularly hurt by the harsh reviews − especially as he had attempted to address the points raised in criticism of his earlier album,
McCartney, by taking a more professional approach. In his review for
Rolling Stone,
Jon Landau called
Ram "incredibly inconsequential" and "monumentally irrelevant", and criticised its lack of intensity and energy. He added that it exposes McCartney as having "benefited immensely from collaboration" with the Beatles, particularly Lennon, who "held the reins in on McCartney's cutsie-pie, florid attempts at pure rock
muzak" and kept him from "going off the deep end that leads to an album as emotionally vacuous as
Ram".
Playboy accused McCartney of "substituting facility for any real substance", and compared it to "watching someone juggle five guitars: It's fairly impressive, but you keep wondering why he bothers." In
NME, Alan Smith called it "an excursion into almost unrelieved tedium" and "the worst thing Paul McCartney has ever done".
Robert Christgau, for
The Village Voice, called it "a bad record, a classic form/content mismatch", but
Paul Levinson countered in
The Village Voice that the mismatch was "in the wires and components of Christgau's stereo". Christgau felt that McCartney succumbed to "
conspicuous consumption" by overworking himself and obscenely producing a style of music meant to be soft and whimsical. Chris Charlesworth of
Melody Maker considered
Ram a better record than
McCartney, but still found it inferior to the recent releases of Harrison and Lennon. Charlesworth concluded: "A good album by anybody's standards and certainly far better than the majority released by British groups and singers. Trouble is you expect too much from a man like Paul McCartney." Four years later,
Roy Carr and
Tony Tyler of
NME wrote, "it would be naive to have expected the McCartneys to produce anything other than a mediocre record ... Grisly though this was, McCartney was to sink lower before rescuing his credibility late in 1973." McCartney's fellow ex-Beatles, all of whom were riding high in critical favour with their recent releases, were likewise vocally critical. Lennon said he hated the album, dismissing it as "muzak to my ears" in his song "
How Do You Sleep?" Starr told the UK's
Melody Maker: "I feel sad about Paul's albums ... I don't think there's one [good] tune on the last one,
Ram ... he seems to be going strange." In addition to conducting a war of words in the British music press,
Retrospect The 2012 reissue of
Ram received an aggregate score of 86 out of 100 from
Metacritic, based on twelve reviews – a score the website defines as indicating "universal acclaim".
Q magazine still found
Ram "frustratingly uneven". In a retrospective review in 1981,
Robert Christgau doubled down on his dislike of the album and panned McCartney's songs in general as pretentious "crotchets ... so lightweight they float away even as Paulie layers them down with
caprices." ==Reissues==