Critical reception The album received mixed reviews, with some interpreting the change in sound positively and some negatively.
John Leland of
The New York Times deemed
Sonic Temple "both [the Cult's] most conventional album and its most convincing", continuing: "Using a few simple riffs and images, the Cult creates an entire environment, one more exciting and stimulating than our own. Bob Rock, the album's producer, washes blunt, powerful sound over the broadness of most of the band's strokes.
Sonic Temple makes a virtue of its lack of subtlety." In a less enthusiastic review for
The Village Voice,
Robert Christgau wrote: "Having risen from cultdom as a
joke metal band metal fans were too dumb to get, they transmute into a dumb metal band. Dumb was the easy part. Ha ha." Karen Douthwaite of
Hi-Fi News & Record Review noticed that the band "recycling the same riffs for the last few albums" and "guitar sound intensified and metallized to
AC/DC proportions." Parke Puterbaugh of
Stereo Review considered that the band "borrows its inspiration" from
Led Zeppelin,
Queen and other AOR heroes from the hard rock Seventies, but "there's something perversely addictive about this music, with its upfront aggression and its slow-motion orgasms of drums and guitars building to a raunchy climax."
Commercial performance The album reached the Cult's highest chart position in the US, peaking at No. 10 on the
Billboard 200 charts, and was
certified Platinum by the
RIAA in 1990.
Accolades == Track listing ==