Review Summary: "We're not scaremongering, this is really happening"
Radiohead must have really had some nerve to release an album as polarizing as
Kid A immediately after releasing one of the most acclaimed rock albums in music history. Had
Kid A been released as a double album with the material from
Amnesiac, it would have been career suicide. However, despite the division it created among both hardcore fans and critics, the album went platinum upon the first week it was released in Britain and went on to be what is known as “the weirdest album to ever sell a million copies.” To even make that remark is a complete understatement of the impact the album had made both upon and since its release as hype around this album still exists.
That being said, what seems most puzzling in retrospect is how the band created an album as underwhelming as what is presented on here. The truth of the matter here is, listening past the polarizing first few listens,
Kid A fails to make a statement as grand and timeless as
OK Computer. Even if
Kid A and
Amnesiac remained a double album, it becomes clear when listening to the latter that Radiohead's creative output seemed more focused on those tracks than what is presented on the hodgepodge of
Kid A. That is not to say that the lack of cohesion is the album’s biggest downfall, but that Radiohead fails to make anything memorable out of the influences that they are clearly pulling from.
One of the key influences to the band’s songwriting during
OK Computer was Miles Davis’ album
Bitches Brew of which Thom says:
Quote:
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“It was building something up and watching it fall apart, that's the beauty of it. It was at the core of what we were trying to do with OK Computer.”
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While traces of this attitude (as well as the jazz-fusion aesthetic) are further explored on the material making up
Amnesiac, the material presented here on
Kid A feel uncharacteristically underdeveloped. Probably the best way to summarize the failure of most of the material making up
Kid A lies in the title track and The National Anthem.
The title track ultimately sounds like an unfinished thrown away demo from
The Man-Machine era Kraftwerk. Tracks like the title track suffer from a lack of further exploration and show a sliver of what may have actually been complacency. This is especially exemplified in the track Treefingers where the extended ambient soundscape fails to contribute anything new or interesting in its oddly short run time and thus unintentionally acts as an unnecessary filler track. Not to mention, How to Disappear Completely, Motion Picture Soundtrack, and In Limbo sound like tunes that
Laughing Stock era Talk Talk could have made in their sleep.
Now comes the tracks like The National Anthem where restraint was sorely needed. Although the bass riff on The National Anthem is easily one of the most iconic bass riffs conceived in alternative music, the free form jazz that dominates the latter portion of the song is utterly unbearable as every brass instrument is indistinguishable and create a wall of sound that is synonymous to a nail scraping a chalkboard. Even if that section of the song wasn’t so badly compressed, it would fail to do anything groundbreaking that Ornette Coleman or John Coltrane, (or, hell, even Miles Davis) had already established in the realm of jazz/jazz-fusion. While the same criticism of a lack of restraint in experimentation applies to Morning Bell, the demo version found on
Amnesiac ironically displays a much more focused and emotional sound than the final product.
However, this is not to say that
Kid A does not possess any redeeming factors. Everything in its Right Place, Optimistic, and Idioteque are modern masterpieces in their own right and are truly some of the greatest tunes Radiohead has created. The flow of the album itself is rather cohesive in the same way that
The White Album may be considered cohesive in its own twisted way. However, the listening experience is greatly crippled by the severe lack of focus displayed by the majority of the songs on the album. While the often cryptic lyrics (due to the method of cutting up and reassembling) themselves are quite fascinating to read, the futuristic aesthetic of the album had already been epitomized by Kraftwerk’s
The Man-Machine and even on their previous album
OK Computer.
Interestingly, the tracks that make up
Amnesiac display much greater refinement and focus in the band’s songwriting at the time of recording. The philosophy the band developed from
Bitches Brew is honed in and make up an interesting and engaging electronic reinterpretation of jazz-fusion.
Yet, this sort of praise cannot be said for the material Radiohead compiled for
Kid A. For all the hype surrounded by the polarizing nature of the album,
Kid A is simply the sound of the band dipping their toes into a sound they would perfect on future releases
In Rainbows and
The King of Limbs.
Kid A is by no means a bad album, but when hype wears off, it’s an album riddled with glaring imperfections that are uncharacteristic of the band who made it.
