"When you think about it for a second, The Global Blues makes sense. This unrelievedly garrulous, convoluted, annoying and striking album is the work of a singer/songwriter who never hit it quite as big as he, for one, thought he should have. But Danny O'Keefe's resentment is probably undeserved. His best-known songs, "Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues" and "Magdalena," each boasted a catchy little hook — a phrase, a few notes — and a boatload of easy cynicism and sentimentality. Along with his sharp, nasal voice (so grating it's fascinating), O'Keefe had a stardom commensurate with his abilities: a couple of AM hits and listeners were tired of him. Similar pop folkies made better music (Gilbert O'Sullivan, for example), and some made worse (B.W. Stevenson, after "My Maria").
What The Global Blues has going for it is O'Keefe's go-for-broke attitude. While his former backup singers, Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles, have moved on to higher banalities, Danny O'Keefe has depleted his reservoir of comforting irony: all he's got left is bemusement. Thus the title tune, employing a faded love affair as a metaphor for the dissipation of the universe, is extremely pretentious but so modestly performed it gets you on the singer's side immediately.
How long you'll want to stay there is another question. By side two, O'Keefe is fashioning atonal odes to Atlas and yowling howlers like "Mother Mary, save the babies." Before that, however, he's managed some seductive pop melodies ("On the Wheel of Love," "Livin' in the Modern Age") and scored one small triumph. "The Street" is a tersely rendered vision of all the romantic notions of the Sixties, tied to wry predictions for the future. There's a soaring, chillingly unsentimental chorus that's just lovely. I guess we can't count Danny O'Keefe out yet." (Ken Tucker, Rolling Stone)