Radiohead's Hail to the Thief gets its first American reviews

Two of the three American critics reviewing Hail to the Thief early, from advance copies, pick out the same song, “Where I End and You Begin”. The album is out on 9 June in Britain and 10 June on Capitol in the US, but it is already passing between file-sharers, and “There There” is on American radio.

Mikel Jollet gives it 93 per cent in Filter. His first listens left him cold, impressed by the craft but with the words slurred and nothing to hum, as if the band had shut themselves in a small room with Nigel Godrich to act out their own Orwell nightmare. The record starts to make sense to him around track six, and by “I Will” its darkness and paranoia sound like the real world.

Sal Cinquemani is cooler in Slant on 13 May, with three stars out of five. After Kid A and Amnesiac he calls it make-or-break, and places it between Kid A and OK Computer, a move in the right direction that stops a step short. Yet he too names “Where I End and You Begin” the album's best moment, with Yorke's words and singing plainer than in years. He wonders whether the title, taken from the opener “2+2=5”, is aimed at the file-sharers who leaked the album almost two months early or at the American president.

The Orlando Sentinel's unsigned review today begins at the very first sound on the record, Jonny Greenwood plugging his guitar into an amplifier. Its critic found Amnesiac so self-indulgent that the melody drowned, and here the same urge to experiment is put to work for better songs. The review credits Phil Selway's tribal drumming on “There There”, the stabbing guitars of Greenwood and Ed O'Brien, and a record made mostly live in the studio, with a warmth and energy Radiohead have not kept up since The Bends. Its last word is that Radiohead know how to make the most of misery.