Radiohead's guitars are back, say three late reviews of Hail to the Thief

Sean Piccoli, reviewing Hail to the Thief in the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel today, writes that Radiohead had gone so digital that plain amplified guitar on the new record comes as a jolt, and that only they could make a rock gesture sound pioneering. “Go to Sleep” has Jimmy Page in its guitar, he writes, and in “Backdrifts” a laptop's plumbing backs up. Piccoli reckons Radiohead are in their way as popular as the Harry Potter books, and puts their American following down less to Anglophilia than to a very American habit of giving loud voice to victimhood.

Matt Ashare caught the same turn in his “Pop Rocks” column in the Boston Phoenix of 27 June. The record opens on the sound of a guitar being plugged into an amplifier before “2+2=5” starts, then moves between full-band songs, piano ballads such as “Sail to the Moon” and laptop pop such as “Backdrifts”. Radiohead, he writes, have worked the Kid A experiments into their songwriting without losing their pop sense. He rates it a big success, and a relief for anyone the last two albums lost; those records, he thinks, pared the audience down to the true believers, as Pearl Jam did after Ten.

Alessandro Rosa, in the Turin daily La Stampa on 30 June, agrees about the sound, a turn back towards the pop of The Bends with more guitars and the computers kept, used freely and well away from techno, but to Rosa it is also a cheerful record, something rock rarely manages. After Kid A and Amnesiac, two experimental albums he calls brilliant, the band made this one with plain enthusiasm and pleasure in playing together, while Thom Yorke sings of a world of contradictions and lost bearings.

Ashare knows the guess that the thief of the title is George Bush, but the songs, the artwork and most of Yorke's interviews show little sign of American politics; what runs all through the record, for him, is Yorke's usual paranoia.