Two campus papers review Pablo Honey and split over “Creep”

Pablo Honey has had warm reviews this month in two American student papers, The Communicator at IPFW in Fort Wayne and The Strobe at Fitchburg State College, and they disagree about “Creep”.

The Communicator, on 4 November, calls “Creep” the album's high point, though not wholly original, since its reviewer hears an old Hollies song in the melody. He thinks it would be unfair to earlier artists to call Radiohead new or unique. Listeners raised on the Beatles and the Hollies, he suggests, may get more from the record than the alternative crowd, if they give a band with that tag a chance. Whether the band will last is too early to say, he writes, but they are articulate and talented.

Rob Haneisen, in The Strobe on 17 November, finds Radiohead's influences hard to pin down at all. One of his favourites is “Stop Whispering”, for the way it moves from a gentle start into a flood of guitar and screaming, and he rates “Vegetable” the strongest song, one that could stand as the band's anthem against following a formula. “Creep” is good but not the best thing on the record. He rates Thom Yorke above R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe as a singer of pain and sensitivity.