Blood on the Tracks is easily Bob Dylan's strongest, most moving album since Blonde on Blonde. Like no other singer/poet, Dylan at his best transmutes personal frustration, anger, self-pity and moral intolerance into an inspired litany of rage and remorse, and Blood contains not one less than excellent song. My favorite is "Idiot Wind," whose overlapping metaphors and jumbled images work because of, not in spite of, their crudity; its intensity scares me. The same holds for Dylan's singing, which integrates the shouting self-parody of Before the Flood with the gruff sensitivity of his preelectric albums…. Blood on the Tracks, though suffused with pain, also bursts alive with the triumphant exhilaration of having survived. It is outrageously great. (p. 53)

Stephen Holden, in Rolling Stone (by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. © 1975; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission), Issue 182, March 13, 1975.