Pitchfork gives Kid A a perfect 10.0

Pitchfork has scored Kid A 10.0, its top mark, in a review by Brent DiCrescenzo published on 2 October, the day the album comes out in Britain.

The review begins in Florence, at Radiohead's open-air show in Piazza Santa Croce in June (the band played there on 21 and 22 June). DiCrescenzo saw his first shooting star drop behind the church during a new song he calls “Egyptian Song”, with Thom Yorke at a grand piano and Colin Greenwood on double bass. The crowd cheered it as if the band had started “Creep”.

Radio potential, riffs and hooks are no way to measure the album, he argues, and the labels jazz, fusion, ambient and electronic don't fit it either; once a listener is deep inside it, categories stop occurring to them. To DiCrescenzo it is the sound of a band and its leader losing belief in themselves and building again, so that Radiohead hated being Radiohead and still made their most natural Radiohead record. OK Computer now sits one place below it.

He sets “Treefingers” beside the second side of David Bowie and Brian Eno's Low, picks out a heavy Warp Records influence in “Kid A” and “Idioteque”, and likens “Motion Picture Soundtrack” to “Julia” and “Good Night”, the songs that close the two halves of the White Album. His last word counts six people behind the record, Nigel Godrich among them, and names Radiohead the greatest band alive, perhaps the best since the one he leaves as “you know who”.