Four early verdicts on Amnesiac, from Buenos Aires to Edmonton

Diego Fischerman gave Amnesiac the warmest of these early reviews in Página/12, the Buenos Aires daily, on 6 June. He finds Radiohead taking up older rock traditions and developing them instead of copying them, with early Pink Floyd reworked in “Knives Out” and the strings of “Pyramid Song” closer to King Crimson's Red than to the Beatles. He credits the band with thinking hard about their work, playing it well and standing up for risk. He names the jazz players on the closing “Life in a Glasshouse”, Humphrey Lyttelton on trumpet among them.

Dave Johnston, in Edmonton's Vue Weekly on 7 June, starts from the damage he thinks Kid A did, shedding all but the devoted and prompting talk of commercial suicide. His picks for the nearest things here to straight rock songs are “I Might Be Wrong” and “Knives Out”, and he sets the scale of “Pyramid Song” against the bare funk of “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors”. He recommends the album for listening alone, and points out that the liner notes advise keeping the disc out of direct sunlight.

The July issue of EGM no sólo juegos, a Spanish-language games magazine, tells its readers to forget any return to Pablo Honey or The Bends. There are more electronics and a hazier vocal from Thom Yorke, and the magazine decides the band care more about moving on than about big sales.

Rodrigo Fresán is the coolest of the four. Writing in Radar, the Página/12 supplement, on 17 June, he counts OK Computer a success and Kid A a failure, and puts Amnesiac a little above the latter. Within a few years, he predicts, people will talk about Radiohead the way they talk about Yes now.