According to Simon Reynolds in
Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, the album received a "uniformly hostile" response from reviewers upon its release. In his retrospective review of the album, Dean McFarlane of
AllMusic noted that "... Mark Perry and friends did to punk exactly what the movement had intended for the establishment", asking, "... who would have expected a follow-up [to
The Image Has Cracked] as avant-garde abstraction ...?" He goes on to state that "
Vibing Up the Senile Man became closer to free improvisation and avant-garde jazz without a punk anthem in sight ..." and continuing that what it "... represents two decades later is a door opening on multi-faceted post-rock music -- which draws on avant-garde, noise, and jazz and arguably makes more sense in the context of year 2000 as a musical treasure much more than in 1980 ...". == Legacy ==