Nick Hornby tells grown-ups that Kid A is not for them

Nick Hornby has reviewed Kid A for The New Yorker, in the issue dated 30 October, and he wants none of it. Like Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, he argues, the album leans on the kind of fan who follows a band through every turn, and giving it the work it asks for night after night means being 16. Anyone with a job and a relationship is likelier to end up yelling at the stereo that this was meant to be a pop group. Only “Idioteque” comes near the charge of the last two albums for him, and he finds Thom Yorke's voice mostly distorted out of recognition and Jonny Greenwood's guitar largely traded for synths. He also takes aim at the attack on Tony Blair in the hidden booklet, wondering how a band that spent a year failing to finish one track would have handled Kosovo or the Northern Ireland peace process.

David Fricke gave Kid A the lead review in Rolling Stone of 12 October, with four stars out of five. To him it is rock with its roots cut away, a deliberately murky and often irritating record that pays off once it gets under the skin. He also reports a second album, begun alongside this one, due out next year, and two student papers hear talk of a more conventional, guitar-based one in the spring.

The Dallas Observer of 12 October split its review between two critics. Jessica Parker was for the album, a dreamy record whose tunes still stick. Zac Crain wanted to love it and couldn't: with another band's name on the sleeve, he writes, buyers would be hunting for the receipt, and he would rather hear Jonny tune his guitar for an hour. Both of them kept “How to Disappear Completely”.

An unsigned Guardian essay of 11 October took on the charge that the album sets out to shed the band's fans, and answered that the real contempt would have been an OK Computer 2.

Beyond the release-week notices, most of the student papers come round to it. The Daily Northwestern counts one burst of rock on the whole album, about six seconds of “Morning Bell” from 2:07, and likes it more with every play. Rob Bergquist of Evansville's Crescent had friends in Britain send him a copy by FedEx three weeks early, and thinks it may be the first great album of the century. Loyola College's Greyhound sums up the campaign as no singles, no videos and no American tour, and quotes Capitol's Perry Watts-Russell from Billboard. They're widely acknowledged to have made some of the best videos ever, and they're not going to make any videos.⁴ In Turin, La Stampa says the band wanted no single at all and EMI pushed “Optimistic” anyway.

In Buenos Aires, Página/12 argues that in 1971 the album would have surprised nobody, but that in 2000 a rock record offering itself as music rather than ritual is an event.

The October notices