Kid A, Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief reissues go on sale

Capitol/EMI's expanded editions of Kid A, Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief, announced in June, went on sale on Tuesday 25 August. Like the first three albums in March, they were put together with no input from the band. Each comes as a two-CD Collectors Edition, the album plus a disc of B-sides, live tracks and sessions. A Special Collectors Edition adds a DVD of videos and TV appearances.

Kid A had no singles and so no B-sides, and its bonus disc is all live and session recordings. There is a four-song BBC Radio 1 Evening Session from November 2000 and a session for the French channel Canal+ from April 2001, unreleased until now. “True Love Waits”, from the 2001 live album I Might Be Wrong, is filed with the Kid A extras, while the same record's near eight-minute “Everything in Its Right Place” is on none of the sets.

Pitchfork gave the Kid A set 10 out of 10 and named it Best New Reissue. Its reviewer, Rob Mitchum, jokes that Capitol could find no Kid A outtakes because it had already put them out, as Amnesiac. He prefers the BBC session, whose empty room suits the album, to the French one, where the clapping turns “Idioteque” into a party tune.

Joe Tangari scored the three-disc Hail to the Thief 8.6 for the same site, and calls it a cash-grab he can't blame Capitol for. The bonus disc puts the scattered B-sides in one place. His pick of them is “Gagging Order”, a quiet acoustic song he likens to the band's mid-1990s B-sides. Drowned in Sound rates the disc above COM LAG (2plus2isfive), the 2004 Japanese collection of the same B-sides, and picks “Fog (Again)” as the best thing on it.

For anyone who never bought the import singles, Josh Hathaway writes at Blogcritics, the sets are the cheaper way to the tracks that never made the albums. Some fans, he says, are boycotting them all the same, because the band were left out.