FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Radiohead – Kid A
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I am not sure whether I have…
covered this album before for Vinyl Corner (I cannot see any repetition) but, if I have, I think this warrants a rare double inclusion! There are a few reasons why I am including Radiohead’s Kid A in Vinyl Corner - I was going to feature Queen Latifah’s All Hail the Queen, but I will include that next week. For one, this masterful album turns twenty on 2nd October. It is hard to believe that Kid A is almost twenty; it still sounds ahead of its time, and I swear I first heard it only a few years ago! Another reason I want to feature Radiohead’s gem is because the band have made the music news recently. It must have taken a biblical effort, but the band have put together all their music and information onto a website. The Radiohead Public Library has been launched. Here is what Pitchfork reported last week:
“Radiohead.com is now home to the Radiohead Public Library. Today (January 20), the band has launched the comprehensive archive of all things Radiohead in a corrective to the disorder of the online space. To commemorate the launch, the band has released a handful of rarities to streaming services: Below, check out their debut EP, 1992’s Drill; the loosie “I Want None of This” from the 2005 charity compilation Help!: A Day in the Life; and the 2011 remix EP TKOL RMX 8.
The archive groups the miscellanea by era, with thumbnails linking to ad-free videos and galleries. After creating their own library card, fans can explore the band’s catalog, visuals, and various artifacts in a “highly curated and organized archive,” a press release notes. That includes detailed artwork, music videos, HD live and TV performances, B-sides and rarities, previously out-of-print merchandise, and the playlists band members shared around their latter-period recording sessions”.
I have not dipped in yet, but I am going to set aside some serious time to investigate this great archive. Yet another reason why I want to put Kid A under the spotlight is, back in 2000, there were some harsh and mediocre reviews aimed the way of this album. It seems baffling now, but maybe critics were reacting to the shift from the more accessible OK Computer of 1997 – such a left-turn and reinvention displeased some who wanted a more conventional Rock album. It is understandable critics were a bit miffed considering, to that point, Radiohead hadn’t dabbled too much with Electronic-influenced songs and been quite as experimental. Of course, things were rectified down the line when critics had time to digest the album and appreciate the fact it was part of an evolution. The band continued to shift and mutate after Kid A, so people have reacted in hindsight with more awareness and positivity. The fourth album from Radiohead, here was a band who were on a fine run!
They released OK Computer in 1997 and, two years after The Bends, so many people were tuning into this remarkable group. Led by the sensational Thom Yorke, I remember hearing Kid A for the first time. It took me a fair while to get my mind around an album that I was not expecting – I was not anticipating drum machines and synthesisers. I gave it a few spins and, before long, its magic and brilliance got into my heart! Recorded with producer Nigel Godrich, I think Kid A is one of the best albums of the past twenty-five years – it kicked off the twenty-first century in style! I am going to bring in a couple of features later in this feature, but it is clear Radiohead had grown tired of the mainstream Rock scene or doing things like they had before. There were no singles from Kid A, and the band did few promotional bits. They were one of the first bands to use the Internet as a promotional tool – I remember how comparatively fresh and primitive the Internet was back in 2000! Thom York especially suffered burn-out after the success of OK Computer; the band toured extensively, and everyone wanted a piece of them. Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Ed O'Brien and Philip Selway were also feeling the strain; like the band were a bit one trick pony-like and that they needed to do something new. Yorke did not want snappy Rock songs: he want melody and something more immersive and long-lasting.
After 1997, so many bands were following Radiohead, so a repeat of that album would have been unwise and samey. There was a lot of guitar music so, looking to the fringes and acts like Aphex Twin, Radiohead stepped into new territory. Yorke felt Rock was reaching a dead-end and there was not a lot of fresh inspiration out there. Maybe he was on to something: it wasn’t until acts like The White Stripes and Queens of the Stone Age came about at the end of the 1990s/start of the next decade that there was a glimmer of promise. The likes of Aphex Twin excited a downbeat and exhausted Thom Yorke; a new dimension that he could venture into. On Kid A, Radiohead took inspiration from a number of sources. There is a bit of Can here and there and Jazz artists like Charles Mingus; some Hip-Hop and Björk’s Homogenic in other areas. I think Underworld’s music provided guidance and impetus; the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki was the inspiration behind the strings on How to Disappear Completely – a song that seems to soundtrack Thom Yorke’s emotional state after the whirlwind of OK Computer and its aftermath.
I am not going to quote any of the unfair reviews from 2000 because, nearly twenty years after its release, I think the album sounds stronger than ever! Get it on vinyl if you can, as it sounds incredible when you drop the needle! Kid A is one of several masterpieces from Radiohead, and I am excited to see what the band have planned to mark its twentieth (I understand there will be something released). This is what AllMusic offered when they reviewed Kid A:
“In the wake of OK Computer, it became taken for granted among serious rock fans of all ages that Radiohead not only saved rock from itself, but paved the way toward the future. High praise, but given the static nature of rock in the last half of the '90s, it was easy to see why fans and critics eagerly harnessed their hopes to the one great rock band that wanted to push the limits of its creativity, without grandstanding or pandering. Daunting expectations for anyone, even for a band eager to meet them, so it's little wonder that Kid A was so difficult to complete. Radiohead’s creative breakthrough arrived when the band embraced electronica -- which was nearly a cliché by the end of the '90s, when everyone from U2 to Rickie Lee Jones dabbled in trip-hop or techno.
IN THIS PHOTO: Radiohead around the release of OK Computer in 1997/PHOTO CREDIT: Jim Steinfeldt/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
The difference is that the wholehearted conversion on Kid A fits, since OK Computer had already flirted with electronica and its chilly feel. Plus, instead of simply adding club beats or sonic collage techniques, Radiohead strove for the unsettling "intelligent techno" sound of Autechre and Aphex Twin, with skittering beats and stylishly dark sonic surfaces. To their immense credit, Radiohead don't sound like carpetbaggers, because they share the same post-post-modern vantage point as their inspirations. As perhaps befitting an album that’s coolly, self-consciously alienating, Kid A takes time to unfold; multiple plays are necessary just to discern the music's form, to get a handle on quiet, drifting, minimally arranged songs with no hooks. This emphasis on texture, this reliance on elliptical songs, means that Kid A is easily the most successful electronica album from a rock band: it doesn't even sound like the work of a rock band, even if it does sound like Radiohead”.
If you have not heard Kid A before, go and grab a copy and experience something monumental. I don’t think you need to know a lot about Radiohead or the artists they are inspired by to understand Kid A. There is so much variety on the album, you cannot fail to find something that peaks your interest! Many refute the claim that Kid A is a work of genius and hugely influential. I know some find Kid A boring and overrated, but I think it is an album that still sounds utterly amazing! In their assessment, Pitchfork provided some keen observations:
“There's no storyline to pick out from Yorke's lyrics, but a unified thread moves through the album nonetheless: Basically, Kid A is scary as hell. It might be the paranoid, nearly subliminal, unbroken undercurrent of haunted drone, courtesy of a Rhodes or a tape loop or Jonny Greenwood's Ondes-Martenot, a instrument for nightmares if there ever was one. Or it might be Yorke's terrifying one-line, Chicken Soup for the Agoraphobic Soul mantras that alternate between honeyed violence ("cut the kids in half") and clichés and hum-drum observations twisted into panic attacks ("where'd you park the car?").
(A brief intermission to talk about the bonus tracks included with this reissue. Capitol's in a tough spot with finding Kid A outtakes, because they already released such a thing-- it's called Amnesiac...rimshot. So instead the bonus-disc padding is all live tracks, culled from British and French radio or TV shows. In keeping with the album's isolation fixation, the empty studio of the four-track BBC session is the most fitting environment for the band's performance, the vocal manipulations of "Everything in Its Right Place" ricocheting off egg-crate walls. Contrast that with the clap-along crowd on an "Idioteque" from France, which neuters the song's sinister undercurrent and turns it into an inappropriate party jam.)
Every great album needs a great resolution, and Kid A has two: the angelic choir and harps of "Motion Picture Soundtrack" which serve as a much-needed (if fragile and a bit suspicious) uplift needed after such unrelenting bleakness, and a brief ambient coda that justifies the hidden-track gimmick. The silence that surrounds that final flash of hazy analog hiss is almost as rich, conferring a eerie feeling of weightlessness upon anyone who's completed the journey with a proper headphones listen”.
If Radiohead had remained on their OK Computer path, I think they would have retreated or retired for a while. Even if that sound is what fans and critics were hoping for, the band could not keep going that way and knew they could take their music to new places.
There have been a lot of positive articles written since 2000 that highlight the legacy and importance of Kid A. I have been sifting through a few articles, but I came across this from Rolling Stone:
“Man, was this music fun to argue about. Whether you loved or hated Kid A, it gave undeniable entertainment value. All through the miserable fall of 2000, the debates raged on. Is it a masterpiece? A hype? A compendium of clichés? Will it stand the test of time? Why aren’t “Knives Out” or “You and What Army” on this album? Where’d you park the car? Is Al Gore blowing it on purpose? Why didn’t the umpires toss Clemens after he threw the bat? Where’s “Pyramid Song”? Who let the dogs out? When is the second half of this album coming out — you know, the half with the actual Radiohead songs? How did they get away with that in Florida? Is this really happening?
The argument is over, obviously; there’s no controversy over Kid A anymore, and something’s been lost there. The original concept of the album requires an antagonist — the whole “dammit, an artist’s gotta do what an artist’s gotta do” narrative, which requires somebody to do the actual hating. But anybody vaguely interested in Radiohead loves this album; it’s much more fun to argue about In Rainbows or Hail to the Thief. Nobody admits now they hated Kid A at the time, the same way folkies never admit they booed Dylan for going electric. Nobody wants to be the clod who didn’t get it.
I love this album so much now, it’s difficult to find any failed moments on it. Not impossible, though. The horn section in “The National Anthem” was a cornier-than-usual art-rock cliché, trying way too hard for a way-too-obvious gimmick. Sorry, but the “bad horn section as symbol of alienation” thing had been done a time or two before. The premise was Pink Floyd’s “Jugband Blues,” but instead it evoked nightmarish flashbacks of Pete Townshend’s huge 1985 hit “Face the Face” — an acclaimed artistic statement at the time, a forgotten novelty a few months later, a fate that seemed easy to imagine for Kid A. (“Face to Face” sounds a bit like “Idioteque,” too.) All over the album, these guys were trying too hard. The synths had the same painfully gauche effect as Conor Oberst’s voice, so forlorn and hammy, straining for sensitivity until it sounded vaguely humiliating. Yet I ended up loving Kid A, and loving Conor Oberst too. Gauche is beautiful, in a world of dime-a-dozen cool”.
I shall wrap things up in a minute but, looking back to that period between 1998 and 2000, it was such a brave move for Radiohead to jettison that traditional Rock vibe and embrace something (at that point) so unexpected and unusual. The final article I want to bring in is from Classic Albums Sundays, who talk about Radiohead’s progression after OK Computer:
“Yorke had become disenchanted with the rock clichés of machismo, indulgent guitar solos and verse chorus, verse chorus, bridge verse chorus structures. As he told The Guardian, ‘I just wasn’t interested in guitar anymore’ and to Rolling Stone he proclaimed, ” I find it difficult to think of the path we’ve chosen as ‘rock music’. Kid A is like getting a massive eraser out and starting again.” He even said he found melody ‘an embarrassment’.
Rather than repeat the musical blueprint that had jettisoned them into international stardom, the band members maneuvered yet another musical turn this time going even deeper. For inspiration, they turned to the Krautrock of Can and Neu, the forward-thinking jazz of Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, and Alice Coltrane, the experimental pop of Bjork and the Talking Heads, the pulsating beats of DJ Shadow and DJ Krush, and the edgy electronica of Aphex Twin and Autechre.
They were so inspired with their new way of working that they recorded enough material for two albums. This conundrum resulted in another inter-band argument as to whether the new album should be a double, but it was agreed to release them as two separate albums.
‘Kid A’ was released in October of 2000 and it showed a band that had not only re-defined their own sound but had also re-defined rock music itself. Its new sound divided fans with some yearning for another ‘Bends’ or ‘OK Computer’ and others hailing it as a ‘post-rock’ masterpiece”.
Almost two decades after it came into the world, the sensational and unique Kid A keeps revealing layers and nuances. It is a staggering album, and one that you need to listen to! I shall end things here, but I wonder whether the critics who slated Kid A back in 2000 feel differently now. Retrospective acclaim has definitely put the album in a new light, and it shows those who underestimated Kid A all these years ago just…
HOW wrong they were.