Pitchfork gives Radiohead's Kid A Mnesia a 9.2

Pitchfork, which gave Kid A a perfect 10.0 in 2000, has given Kid A Mnesia a 9.2 and its Best New Reissue tag. Jayson Greene's review went up on 5 November, the day XL released the set, which pairs Kid A and Amnesiac with a third disc of session material, Kid Amnesiae.

Even so, for Greene the third disc falls short of the OKNOTOK extras of 2017. Much of the Amnesiac material went round on Napster in 2000, and “Follow Me Around”, billed as the fans' holy grail, was familiar from its scene in Meeting People Is Easy long before its release this month. There is nothing here to match “I Promise” or “Lift”. He misses the original “I Will” demo, the one Jonny Greenwood played backwards to make “Like Spinning Plates”, and puts the new “Fog” below both the “Knives Out” B-side and the piano version first played live in Israel in July 2000.

The scores run from Under The Radar's 10/10, a mark it calls rare, down to 60 per cent from Colin Dempsey at Spectrum Culture, who counts only two songs on the set that nobody had heard, “If You Say The Word” and “Follow Me Around”. He still ranks the second among Thom Yorke's most aggressive vocals. Kevin Harley, giving four stars in Record Collector, takes those two and “Fog (Again Again)” as the more tune-led guitar album the band could have made instead.

Several critics share one complaint, that neither album was remastered or remixed. Jack Moeser in The Michigan Daily notes that the 2017 OK Computer reissue was remastered, and would think twice before recommending the $23 CD to anyone with the albums already on the shelf.

Reviewing for The Observer 21 years after its sister paper the Guardian gave Kid A two stars, Phil Mongredien calls the songs as strong as OK Computer's. Janne Oinonen at The Line of Best Fit dismisses the old charge that the band had given up on melody, since the tunes left off Kid A, “Knives Out” and “Pyramid Song”, went onto Amnesiac. For Darran Anderson, who makes the set The Quietus's Reissue of the Week, Amnesiac is the better record, and the set's real achievement is to give it equal footing with Kid A.

The first week's reviews