In writing for the Chicago Tribune, Kevin M. Williams noted that the music sounded as if "The Stooges were jamming with the MC5, with a guest appearance from Jimi Hendrix, and they've lost the set list, so they're just rocking out" and that "Kawabata makes a strong case for a slot in the shredder hall of fame, laying down sheets of precise, note-rich frenzy from his severely overdriven guitar."[2] In a retrospective review, Tiny Mix Tapes awarded the album four-and-a-half out of five stars, saying "until experiencing Mainliner's Imaginative Plain, I’d never heard an album compressed within an inch of collapsing into a black hole, so dense that only pure distortion could escape."[1]