According to the review aggregator Metacritic, There is No Other received "universal acclaim" based on a weighted average score of 86 out of 100 from 8 critic scores.[4]
The album, which primarily features Giddens and Turrisi playing together on several instruments, presents a mixture of interpretations to a diverse collection of songs from around the world with two original songs (by Giddens). Since its release, There Is No Other was publicly introduced as an album which is "Tracing the overlooked movement of sounds from Africa and the Arabic world and their influence on European and American music..." and which "...illuminates the universality of music and the commonality of the human experience".[15]
The reviews usually followed these lines of introduction, and mainly praised the unique implementation and the high quality outcome. However, among the writing concerning the album there is an article which stands out for reviewing There Is No Other in a wider musicological context, pointing out its relation to the work of Peter Van der Merwe, especially Van der Merwe's meticulously researched book "Origins of the Popular Style".
The article, written by John Jeremiah Sullivan (as an in-depth examination of the cultural and historical context of Giddens' work as a whole) explains that in his research: "Van der Merwe shows how the “gliding chromaticism” characteristic of the blues spread via Islamic influence into West Africa (in particular the Senegambia region) and, via Spain, into Ireland and the “Celtic fringe.” From those places, these styles and sounds rode farther west, to North America, on slave ships and immigrant ships. In the American South, the Celtic and the African musical traditions met. It was an odd family reunion. Each culture had its own songs, but the idioms understood one another. The result was American music.". Against that background, Sullivan therefore opines that "the album that Giddens and Turrisi have made together functions as a kind of proof of Van der Merwe’s musicological thesis".[16][17]
"To my ears, the album is the first true Rhiannon Giddens record. Joe Henry produced it, beautifully, by getting as far out of the way as possible. The arrangements are stark. The engineering and the mike placement are direct and intimate. It’s the sonic equivalent of a long still shot in natural light".[18]
^Noting elsewhere in the article that Giddens is aware of and referred to Van der Merwe’s book during a keynote address she gave on September 2018 at the AmericanaFest conference, in London: "she used it to illustrate her point that the instruments that we typically 'think of in modern music—the guitar, the banjo, bagpipes, violins, the list goes on—have been in constant movement and constant change since the time of the ancient world'."
^Elaborating, as a further example, the story of how Giddens and Turrisi's version of the ballad “Little Margaret,” came about
