Uncut gives In Rainbows four stars as the later reviews arrive

More than three weeks after the download and the first reviews, Stephen Troussé gives it four stars out of five in Uncut on 2 November. He rates it the band's most conventionally built album since OK Computer. He wonders whether they stockpiled their most radio-friendly songs until the EMI contract had run out, or whether the solo records and film scores had drawn off the fractured electronic side of the last three albums. For Troussé “House of Cards” is the heart of the record, with Thom Yorke back in the tender voice of his early albums, and he concludes that the band have found fresh purpose.

Carl Cullinane, reviewing In Rainbows for Cherwell, Oxford's student paper, remembered Yorke singing a new song called “Reckoner” at the Trade Justice Movement's all-night vigil in Westminster in April 2005, with a line asking for a fair price. That line and almost all of the 2005 arrangement are gone from the album, and Cullinane argues that the fair-price idea moved out of the song and into the way the record was sold. Cherwell gave the album five stars, crediting Jonny Greenwood's string arrangements with pulling a scattered set of songs together and calling “House of Cards” the sexiest song the band have written.

The album's “Reckoner” is itself a different song from the older one of that name the band had played since 2001. It grew out of a coda written during work on “Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses” and kept the title.

The Houston Press expected the way the album was sold to bury the music, but named “All I Need” the one song bolder than the release itself. The East Bay Express read “House of Cards” as a song about infidelity.

Cokemachineglow ran two pieces, one for and one against, each pointing readers to the other. Alan Baban and Clayton Purdom call it a pop record rather than a concept album, and Phil Selway's record most of all, with his cymbals carrying the climax of “All I Need”. Chet Betz and Joel Elliott call the pay-what-you-want release a stunt only a band this big could pull without risk, and complain that “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” and “Reckoner” use almost the same guitar picking. Even so, they concede it is the band's most cohesive record since Kid A.

The reviews