Several critics felt "Kid A" was pretentious or deliberately obscure. The "Irish Times" bemoaned the lack of conventional song structures and panned the album as "deliberately abstruse, wilfully esoteric and wantonly unfathomable ... The only thing challenging about "Kid A" is the very real challenge to your attention span." In the "New Yorker", novelist Nick Hornby wrote that it was "morbid proof that this sort of self-indulgence results in a weird kind of anonymity rather than something distinctive and original". "Melody Maker" critic Mark Beaumont called it "tubby, ostentatious, self-congratulatory, look-ma-I-can-suck-my-own-cock whiny old rubbish ... about 60 songs were started that no one had a bloody clue how to finish". Alexis Petridis of the "Guardian" described it as "self-consciously awkward and bloody-minded, the noise made by a band trying so hard to make a 'difficult' album that they felt it beneath them to write any songs".