Radiohead's Kid A still splits the critics two months on

Rodrigo Fresán bought Kid A and Paul Simon's You're the One on the same day, and in Radar, the Sunday supplement of the Buenos Aires paper Página/12, he set them against each other on 5 November. Simon's record invites the listener in. Radiohead's shuts the door in their face, which Fresán does not hold against it, except that before slamming it the band rang the bell several times to make sure nobody missed the appointment.

It took him several attempts to get through the album. On one he reached “How to Disappear Completely”, track four and to his ears the first more or less normal song, then gave up and put on Paul Simon, whose album at least has a single, “Old”. Kid A has none, and no video. Its one real virtue, Fresán decides, is to be muzak and white noise at the same time, and nobody could swear it won't soon sound as dated as the prog rock the punks swept away. He has heard the band's newer songs live in Barcelona, though, and expects the best of them, “Egyptian Song” and “Knives Out” among them, on a more ordinary record within three months.

The album went in at number one in Britain and America in its first week. La Stampa of Turin reviewed it on 6 November under the headline “Radiohead without guitars”, next to Björk's Selmasongs and PJ Harvey's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. A band with three guitarists, it notes, plays none at all on the first three tracks. The paper finds the album rich in ideas, with a cold allure, and picks “Treefingers” and “Optimistic” as the weak spots; the first, it says, would suit a massage parlour. Stuff, the American men's magazine, admits in its November issue that it cannot say where Radiohead are heading, and prints a guide to the records it thinks lie behind Kid A instead, from Brian Eno's Music for Airports to Tortoise and Morphine.

The American student papers of 3 November follow October's critics. Melissa Genova, in The Observer at Saint Joseph's College, finds Kid A hard going for newcomers but memorable, and rates “Optimistic” the nearest thing to OK Computer. Kyle McKinnon of The Sewanee Purple calls Radiohead the Pink Floyd of the 1990s and beyond, doubts the album will change rock, and picks “Idioteque” as its high point. Both pass on talk of a second album soon, in a more familiar Radiohead sound. For Pearson Greer, writing in the webzine Opus the same day, it is the record that finally made him a fan, a very human album for all its machines.

Sean Piccoli, in the Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale on 18 December, calls Kid A brave and beautiful but transitional, and sets “Optimistic”, a flash of discovery to him, beside “Idioteque”, which he hears as a tentative exercise. He reports that the band plan another record in the spring, and thinks Kid A is likely its prototype.

The reviews