What did Christgau, the poll's creator and supervisor, name third best?
Too Much Too Soon received positive reviews from contemporary critics. Reviewing for Rolling Stone in 1974, Dave Marsh hailed the New York Dolls as the leading hard rock band in the US and noted what he felt was Nolan's competent drumming, Johansen's ability to add depth to his characters, and Thunders's innovative guitar playing. Marsh especially praised his playing on "Chatterbox", calling it "a classic", and believed even the most brazen songs sounded successful because Morton's production highlighted the group's more unrefined musical qualities. Writing for Creem magazine, Christgau said the polished sound reproduction preserved the band's raw qualities, especially in the case of Johansen's vocals and Nolan's drumming, and remarked that Rundgren "should be ashamed—Shadow Morton has gotten more out of the Dolls than they can give us live on any but their best nights." Robert Hilburn from the Los Angeles Times felt Too Much Too Soon was a better-produced album that proved the band to be "the real thing", calling it the best record of derisive punk rock since Exile on Main St. by the Rolling Stones in 1972. In The New Yorker, Ellen Willis wrote that she learned to appreciate Too Much Too Soon more than New York Dolls after seeing the band perform songs from the former album in concert, particularly "Human Being" and "Puss 'n' Boots", while Ron Ross from Phonograph Record magazine said the group's "easy going ironic sensibility" was expressed "far more amusingly and accessibly" here than on their debut album.Some reviewers were critical of Too Much Too Soon for what they felt was a poorly recorded and overproduced sound. In a negative review for NME, Nick Kent said it sounded cluttered and "shot through with unfulfilled potential", while Circus magazine panned the record as "cut after cut of annoying screeching". It was nonetheless voted the tenth best album of 1974 in the Pazz & Jop, an annual poll of American critics nationwide, published in The Village Voice. Willis, one of the critics polled, listed it as her fifth favorite record of the year. Christgau, the poll's creator and supervisor, named it third best, and in a decade-end list for The Village Voice, he named it the fourth best album of the 1970s. Los Angeles Times critic Richard Cromelin included it in his list of favorite records from the decade and wrote that Morton's production made it slightly better than New York Dolls.
Too Much Too Soon