 Dedicating a paragraph of his 1968 review to the track, writer Tony Glover summarised the lyrical content of the song before noting that "With tape loops, melancholy guitar and the flute of Chris Wood … Hendrix structures a beautiful undersea mood – only to destroy it with some heavy-handed guitar.My first reaction was, why did he have to do that?Then I thought that he created a beautiful thing, but lost faith [in] it, and so destroyed it before anybody else could – in several ways, a bummer".