The band had once been known as the J. Geils Blues Band, but its debut album revealed the stylistic range it had long developed. In an effusive contemporary review, a journalist for rock magazine Creem praised the diversity and wrote: "It could be called blues, it could be called R&B, it could be called rock and roll; I prefer to call it good energetic music and leave it at that. They spent their formative years absorbing the best of all these musics and the sound they have distilled is truly their own."[4]
