Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield backs Amnesiac over Kid A

Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone's critic, has given his column in the magazine's 16 August issue to the case for Amnesiac over Kid A. The one Kid A song he liked enough to tape was “Optimistic”, and he calls even that a straight lift of Blind Faith's “Can't Find My Way Home”; the rest he found a letdown that recycled the worst of 1970s progressive rock. Amnesiac he calls a terrific record, instrumentals and all.

It is made entirely of songs from the Kid A sessions, and it went in at number one in Britain in June and at number two in America. Sheffield reckons the people turning against it are the ones who took Kid A too seriously. What wins him over is the four or five guitar ballads in its first half, and the Allman Brothers he finds in “I Might Be Wrong”. His case is that Radiohead are a great guitar band who lose him when they chase abstract atmosphere.

Kevin Hattrup put Amnesiac among the summer's best albums in The Greyhound, the student paper of Loyola College in Maryland, on 5 September. To him it finishes the band's break with conventional songwriting, less of a piece than Kid A but better with each listen, and “You and Whose Army?” and “Knives Out” are sneers at the press. His favourite is “Life in a Glasshouse”, where trombone, oboe and trumpet with a New Orleans swing stand in for distorted guitar.

The Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale is harder on it today. Its unsigned review finds the record remote and unfinished, the polished leftovers of the Kid A sessions, and says “Morning Bell/Amnesiac” should have been a B-side, though it praises the clattering opener, “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box”, and the reworked “Knives Out”. Even so, it decides that Radiohead's leftovers beat other bands' best.

Late-summer verdicts