Contemporary reception was positive, with
NME praising the album's "highly unusual but fascinating sound" and
Time Out calling it "unique". However, sales were limited and the band dissolved after the album's release. Early biographies of Comus stated that a postal strike was one of the reasons that the album did poorly; however, none have provided an explanation for how a postal strike would have affected one particular album's sales.
The Wire included it on their 1998 list of "100 Records That Set The World On Fire [When No One Was Listening]", calling it "
folk rock at its most delirious, devilish, and dynamic." In 2014,
FACT Magazine ranked it the 22nd best album of the 1970s, writing: Based in Kent, Comus specialised in ingenious hokum: squawking tales of torture, pagan worship, zephyrs and psychotics. Unsurprisingly, they barely made a commercial ripple [...], but from the twanging fiddles and eldritch voices of ‘Diana’ onwards,
First Utterance is both unapologetically weird and commendably self-assured. It’s extremely – and sometimes off-puttingly – mannered, but if you’re looking for the square root of the mid-2000s
freak-folk explosion, this is it. ==Track listing==