"...If Heaven Or Las Vegas is a gorgeous sunset panorama conveyed by a seamlessly shot and very generously budgeted tracking shot that passes through the centre of a beautifully overdeveloped city, Blue Bell Knoll is a morning amble through a frozen meadow in the middle of Highland nowhere. The same songwriting and arrangement principles that underpinned Heaven… are here, but in a purposefully skeletal form of what they would later become. ‘Crystalline’ is a word so often used to describe Cocteau Twins, albeit accurately, that I was going to forego it altogether, but it applies so strongly to this album even in the face of their sound in general that there’s no two ways around it: crystals are beautiful and evocative of nature in a way that sometimes seems oddly otherworld, but they are also hard, brittle and frigid if you can’t help yourself and starting getting hands-on with them. So it goes for Blue Bell Knoll. It’s not nearly as sparse as, say, Victorialand, but in many ways its tone is twice as cold; an impressive feat given that the other album took its name from a colonially named region of the Antarctic. Much of the Twins’ best work has a magical allure to it, and immersive feel that seems to draw you into a whole new world of calming gloom and structural ambiguity; not so here. This is an album to be appreciated and marvelled at just as much as any other superior Cocteau Twins release, but from a position of slight distance rather than up close and personal..."

- Hugh G. Puddles, sputnikmusic.com