Radiohead's Hail to the Thief wins round the late reviewers

Richie DeMaria, reviewing Hail to the Thief for the webzine Opus on 6 September, says it took him two months after the release to write about it with any confidence. He had known the songs since the summer of 2002, when the band tried them out on audiences in Spain and Portugal, and he names “There There”, “We Suck Young Blood” and a reworked “Lift”. When the unfinished album leaked months before release he refused to download it, because he wanted to hear the record finished. His first play of it left him dismayed; the second and third won him round.

He ends up calling it one of the best albums of the year and a step backwards for the band, high on good songs and low on emotional impact, too long, and without anything as cinematic as “Exit Music (For a Film)” or “How to Disappear Completely”. The last two tracks, “Scatterbrain” and “A Wolf at the Door”, are its best. “Sit Down. Stand Up.”, which he first took for the worst song Radiohead had made, has become a favourite, and he puts the lighter mood down to a band in better spirits.

The campus papers were warmer. Mike O'Leary, in the Hamilton College Spectator of 5 September, calls Radiohead the band saving rock from the likes of Staind, Nickelback and Creed, and thinks the album may be their best, high praise from a writer who counts OK Computer among the best albums ever made. He reads the album as an attack on the opportunist politics that the world after 9/11 has fed in Britain and America.

A week later David Allen in The Bucknellian takes the title for a common anti-Bush slogan but the lyrics for an appeal for vigilance more than a political statement. His highest praise is that it rocks, with Jonny Greenwood's and Ed O'Brien's guitars back and the hums and crackles still running under “The Gloaming” and “Backdrifts”, and he recommends it to anyone the last two albums put off.

The Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reviews it today, the day before Radiohead and Supergrass play the Sound Advice Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach, and calls it one of the most original albums of the year. “There There” is where everything comes together and “Backdrifts” the low point, a slip back into the electronics of Amnesiac. “Myxomatosis”, named after a rabbit disease, is the most inventive of the new songs, and “A Punchup at a Wedding” has the best piano in a Radiohead song since “Karma Police”.

The reviews