According to music critic David Browne, The Bliss Album...? continues and expands on the mentally stimulating hip hop of the duo's debut album.[4]Entertainment Weekly said the duo "perfected" the style of pop-rap with their second album,[17] while Spin magazine's J. Matthew Hanna called the music "hip hop pop".[18] The magazine's Craig Marks described the record as "pop nirvana".[19]AllMusic's Steve Huey wrote that it emphasized its predecessor's urban soul sounds, favored melodies rather than raps, and featured both pop and aggressive rap songs.[1] In the opinion of Tom Breihan from Stereogum, "the album serves as an absolute rejection of rap-music values that was, at the time, coming from a group that existed, more or less, within the context of the rap music establishment. It was one big soft, gushy negation".[20]
The album also included "So On and So On", which led to a 1999 sampling lawsuit. In the lawsuit Batiste v. Island Records, Inc., Paul and Michael Batiste claimed that P.M. Dawn's song "So On and So On" used unauthorized samples from David Batiste & The Gladiators' "Funky Soul". The fifth Circuit Federal Appellate Court found that the Batistes point to no evidence in the record demonstrating that consumers were confused or deceived by either the use of a digital sample of "Funky Soul" in "So On and So On" or the attribution to David Batiste as a co-author of the track. The Batistes' claim that Paul and Michael Batiste were improperly excluded from the liner notes accompanying the album also failed to suggest that consumers were confused, especially because the liner notes do credit the name of the band in which both Paul and Michael Batiste performed.[21]
^Moon, Tom (April 11, 1993). "P.M. Dawn: The Bliss Album (Vibrations of Love and Anger and the Ponderance of Life and Existence) (Gee Street) / Basehead: Not in Kansas Anymore (Imago)". The Philadelphia Inquirer.
^"P.M. Dawn: The Bliss Album…? (Vibrations of Love and Anger and the Ponderance of Life and Existence)". Q. No. 79. April 1993. p. 80.