Well, you have heard the hype. The reviews. The blog posts. The retrospectives. The most pretentious thing Pitchfork ever published. Kid A is an album that is very difficult to come at with anything new to say. It is said that the majority of coding on the internet is used for pornography, cats and reviews/comments about Kid A. Despite every precedence that came before it, whenever an artist goes through a stylistic reinvention that heaps great rewards, this is the first album the critics return to.
To be fair, it made its mark by actually being a radical switch. By all accounts, lead singer Thom Yorke had grown tired of guitar music, suffering from writer’s block as a result and forcing the whole band to go in a completely other direction. This received mixed responses from the rest of the band at first, but feeling that OK Computer had pigeonholed expectations of them they ultimately decided that the move into electronics was the best option. Now, it’s not as though IDM acts like Apex Twin, and contemporaries like Bjork, had not released album’s pointing towards Kid A’s sound that were popular (in fact they are both checked as influences). And Kid A is not what could be described as avant-garde. But between the influences from 20th Century Classical Music, IDM, Krautrock, Talk Talk style post-rock, the most modern electronics available combined with returns to older sounds with the ondes Martenot, Kid A is probably on the list of the strangest albums to ever be #1 on the Billboard Charts. As I write this the closest comparison I can think of for such an esoteric to find that much empirical evidence of popularity since then, other than maybe Yeezus, might have happened just now, with David Bowie’s Blackstar being at the top of the charts. Although that is definitely for much sadder reasons.
David Bowie is definitely a reference point beyond that. Not just because Bowie with the Berlin Trilogy and U2 with Achtung Baby are the closest comparisons to reinventing styles in popular music, and not just because like Bowie’s classic work from that period is similarly an exercise of rhythms more than melodies. It’s also because Thom Yorke created the lyrics under a similar post-breakdown state. Given Yorke’s mentality at the time, he felt the need to form his lyrics using the tried-and-tested cut up technique, throwing multiple line snippets into a bowl and placing desperate ideas together with a sense of eventual unity. The result actually ended up being the obvious next step to the themes of The Bends and OK Computer, with paranoia and alienation being at the centre. But at this point, and in this style, the repeated images/lyrics form pictures in our head that are concrete but at the same time incredibly abstract. Kid A’s album cover is in that respect a perfect metaphor, and the inverse to the previous: OK Computer had landscapes that were abstracted, but if you looked closer you can see the picture; Kid A has a landscape that presents itself very clearly, but the more you look at it the less of this world it becomes (again, credits to the great Stanley Donwood, in my mind the band’s seventh member).
It was certainly unfamiliar to many critics at the time, some of whom declared it a masterpiece outright, but others who felt betrayed by the band who was meant to bring back the prominent guitar rock sound. As for myself, I first came to this album as my third Radiohead album, after OK Computer and Hail to the Thief, and my initial reactions were very much in the latter category. I didn’t listen to electronic music; what was this strange sound? Why did it take until the sixth song before there was any electric guitar? Why can I not get any grasp on what is going on? My ten year old mind was made up. Until it wasn’t. Until it wouldn’t leave my head, and I listened to it again. And again. Until it all seemed to click for me, and became my favourite album.
Still today, it is among my top 5 favourite albums ever, and of the already amazing Radiohead discography only one other album ever from them wrestles that position from my mind (but more on that soon). Beyond that, and beyond the fact it made me expand my musical horizons in a way no other piece of music ever did, it was one of the first album’s I ever examined musically. Both to perform songs from the record and to try and break down why I enjoyed it so much. Should help me do this, right? (I also apologise later on for not being able to give proper credit to every member of the band. So, for the record, they’re all awesome).
Naming the opening song “Everything In Its Right Place” for an album that is of a definite departure sonically plays almost like a joke. The chilliest joke ever written though, with looping vocals of the album title and a keyboard rhythm that in a live setting reveals itself as the hidden trance number it is. A dada ambient poem full of sourness (“yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon”) to references to Rothko (“there are two colours in my head”), the result is a search for some kind of reality that makes that title even more ironic. Similarly as those two colours, the song plays between the major and minor in a way quintessential to classic Radiohead, and being written in the Ab/F minor key but never playing those chords adds to that feeling of not finding a base, a home. Sorry, I’ll try not to be that technical throughout.
Speaking of the technical, the title track embraces more of that technology not just in the electronic drums and some of the iciest synthesisers I’ve ever heard, but in the decision to record Thom Yorke’s voice through a vocaliser. Yorke has been on record as saying he hates the limits the prettiness of his voice has to some genres of music, and “Kid A” is one part of the ongoing battle to make his voice “uglier” (of course why anyone would not want a voice as good as Thom Yorke’s is beyond me). There’s an element of this that, like “Fitter Happier”, is novel and could be perceived as cheesy, but it works mainly because we can hear the semblance of reality that is trying to come out (the same would be case for the more artful uses of autotune). Meanwhile the lyrics still keep to an idea of discovery, the end of the song making the character sound like an apocrphyal Pied Piper trying to get out of any semblance of reality. Even in small snippets there is the sense of revolution, “we’ve got heads on sticks/You got ventriloquist’s” being such a evocative line, as cut up and as related as that head to that stick.
That ties beautifully into “The National Anthem”, the song in which some analogue instruments finally make their way in. And there entrance is grand indeed, with the inclusion of both Phil’s impeccable drumming backed by an entire brass section bringing some incredible jazzy goodness (jazzy Radiohead is among my favourite Radiohead, but more on that when we get to Amnesiac). Somehow originally planned as a b-side to OK Computer, this wailing anthem builds upon Colin’s singular riff until the cacophony can’t help but collapse in on itself. A good metaphor for nationalism, also met with the lyrics that simultaneously want to bring people together and then throw them away. I also thought I should mention that, on stage, Jonny Greenwood introduces the song with what can only be described as a “Radio solo”. The fact that was an idea implemented is a wonderful ode to creativity.
As indeed is the whole instrumentation of “How to Disappear Competely”, often said by Thom Yorke himself to be his favourite Radiohead song and I would definitely put in that every interchanging top three. The gorgeous Penderecki like strings that back Thom Yorke’s elegant guitar are among the best orchestrations of Jonny’s career, even in his movie career, and is backed still by the ondes Martenot in a way that still feels alien. That fits perfectly into Thom’s lyrics, inspired by words that were spoken to him by Michael Stipe when they toured with R.E.M (that would in turn inspire songs in their Up/Reveal period), which were in turn meant to comfort Thom to tune out to the situation around him. Those words of comfort, “I’m not there and this isn’t happening”, are casted out with such a sum of awe that it makes for the most emotional moments of any Radiohead song, perfect after the album’s previous emotional confusions, but with that denial of reality still always present.
Almost as a means to settle us emotionally, but still a powerful piece in its own right, comes the rare instrumental of any Radiohead album with “Treefingers”. Ambient music very much in the Brian Eno tradition, the piece combines electronic components with sounds manipulated from Ed O’Brien’s that would make the perfect backing music to the lakeside that would exist in the world of Kid A’s cover. Although among the most electronic pieces of an album already steeped in such, I would actually call this among the most warm, embracing, like dipping into that said lake and floating upon it in suspended animation. On my vinyl copy, pressed onto two discs for some reason, it is the end to the first disc, which is among the best and succinct concluding pieces I’ve heard for a first disc.
The second disc, therefore, would begin incredibly forcefully with “Optimistic”. Finally the electric guitars return for the world to see, but compared to OK Computer and The Bends these guitars are much more angular, rough, as dry as though we had come out of my hypothetical lake. Instead of serving mainly as rhythm, Colin’s bass can be heard layered amongst the rest of the party, continuing ratcheting intensity with each higher note until it must come down again. For a song called “Optimistic”, and seems for the large part to be completely sincere, there’s an element of that collapse throughout the track, particularly in the bridge, which helps to make that chorus of “the best you can is good enough” feel all the more powerful. Oh and sample artists: take that last beat change and sample the shit out of it. You can thank me later with a cut of your royalties.
That beat change helps to transition us better into “In Limbo”, a return to that suspended space and also a return of the icy keyboards and reverb. In fact, with the line “‘I’m lost at sea, don’t bother me”, perhaps my lake metaphor would have better been suited here. “Another message I can’t read” as a line is both a further exploration into the surreality of the world the band has create, and also I presume another joke about the continuing abstractness. Like the song would suggest, the music itself is in limbo, the guitars in 3/4 but the drums 4/4, the resulting polyrhythm pulling the listener between two sides until all they can do is succumb to the the “fantasy world” of the song.
But better a “fantasy world” than a bunker. So soon after that limbo does the album throw us back into what it calls reality in “Idioteque”, in its own words “We’re not scaremongering/This is really happening, happening”. Of course that could be a lie. With a sample of four (complex) chords from Paul Lanky’s “Mild und Leise”, turns it into a full on apocalyptic rave, in the midst of warfare and a call to arms. To what is unclear; lines like “Ice age coming, ice age coming/ Throw me in the fire” and “Let me hear both sides” suggest both against the political class and for the environment (Thom is a big campaigner in such). Either way the final line’s of the song, “the first of the children…” suggest no one is making it out of this (though Thom does change this line in concert, including “this one is for the children”, which has a more optimistic ring to it).
“Morning Bell” might sound like the call for alert matched with “Idioteque’s” war, but by contrast its keyboards sound surprisingly calm and collected. There’s still a feel of the militaristic about it though, particular with the constant marching beat of the drums, and the line alluding to the Judgement of Solomon “cut the kids in half” here playing more like the cries of dictatorship. There are two versions of this song that exist, and although we’ll get more in the second version with Amnesiac, I have to say the smooth keyboards and alien 5/4 time signature of this release has always been my preferred version. Oh, and I always found amusing how Boston Thom sounds on the “where’d you park the car?” line.
This march builds to the album’s climax, the song it took exactly thirteen years too long to actually make to make it onto a movie, the twisted “Motion Picture Soundtrack”. Like a twisted cabaret show, you can here the creeks of the organ being played upon, and the result of that combined with beautiful yet uncanny sounding harps and double bass results in a song that sounds like a Disney Musical set in purgatory, or Gershwin in space. I don’t think Thom Yorke has ever written more desperate sounding lyrics, with references to “cheap sex” and burning letters in some attempt at division and loneliness. The lyrics are lonely, but the music is maybe the most overtly gorgeous piece on Kid A. I’m never one to use information from outside the product to read it, but perhaps the previous final verse makes this contrast more clear:
Beautiful angel
Pulled apart at birth
Limbless and helpless
I can’t even recognize you
The actual end, though, is a piece of untitled ambient music. Full of reversing instruments, like the waves of this album’s alien sea, it helps to bring us back to the sense of reality. Like the Kid A, of the title, we are being deactivated.
Only for you to reactivate it again. Kid A is among the albums I always return to, because even the minimal wasteland of this world has so much to give. The band expunges its depressive anxieties with a work that transports them to a place were they can be buried, and creates music so beautiful and bizarre, that it is a world none of the band’s who imitated them in nineties could even hope to create. There would, however, be more material than could be put there, and Radiohead were struck with what to do with these pieces. Don’t worry though, they were just as impressive. They weren’t slept upon…
What did you think, though?
Radiohead Album Rankings
- Kid A
- OK Computer
- The Bends
- Pablo Honey
B-Side Corner
There are no actual B-Sides for the Kid A sessions. If they were, they would be transferred to to the Amnesiac disc, which on some part is why this feels like such the completed piece that it is. The rest of the songs on the Collectors Edition of Kid A are live renditions of the work, and its remarkable how such an insular piece moves so beautifully into a expansive setting.
One of those live works, however, is an exception. “True Love Waits” was never officially recorded in the studio, instead only one performance making it onto the I Might Be Wrong EP, but it is that immediacy of that live performance that gives it so much of its raw energy. Played only by Thom on guitar, the lyrics seem to tale someone who is a slave to his emotions for a woman, willing to give up everything to be with them, but for whatever reason that relationship has now ended. “I’m not living I’m just killing time” is among the best single line’s of Thom’s whole career, and the second verse runs the gamut from childhood happiness (“true love lives/ on lollipops and crisps) to ghoulish death (“true love waits/ in haunted attics) in a way that makes you feel a whole life has passed, though given they are in the other order it could be that it has begun again. Confession time, given recent losses in my life, I found the cries “Just don’t leave” to more emotionally devastating than they ever have been before. It’s almost country music levels of raw.