 Joshua Klein wrote that Hood was "surprisingly sanguine, even mature" in the way he addressed both positive and negative topics on the album, and AllMusic's Mark Deming said that its songs were "dark but compassionate character studies," adding that it "consistently cuts closer to the bone" than Hood's debut solo album "Killers and Stars" (2004).Greg Kot gave "Murdering Oscar" three stars out of four and wrote that it "maintains a certain raw immediacy.