Radiohead Kid A Review

The production on Kid A is the argument made audible. Godrich and the band spent 18 months figuring out how to record electronic instruments collaboratively, and the album sounds like the process: loops and sequences layered with live playing, synthesisers scrubbed and manipulated in Pro Tools, vocals processed with ring modulators and vocoders. Everything in Its Right Place was recorded as a full-band arrangement in Copenhagen and Paris without results; in Gloucestershire, Yorke and Godrich transferred it to the Prophet-5 and built the song from two-handed chords and a vocal run through a scrubbing tool. The National Anthem started with a bassline Yorke wrote in school, layered with ondes Martenot and radio-static samples and a brass section recorded in November 1999 with instructions to sound like organised chaos, inspired by Charles Mingus. The result is a controlled mess: horns blaring over a locked groove, the arrangement wide enough that every element has space.

Jonny Greenwood wrote the string arrangement for How to Disappear Completely by multitracking his ondes Martenot, then handed the score to the Orchestra of St John's, who laughed because it was impossible. They recorded it anyway in a 12th-century church five miles from the Oxfordshire studio, and the performance has the grain of a room, strings bending and sliding around Yorke's vocal. Idioteque is the opposite approach: a drum machine pattern Greenwood made on a modular synthesiser, a sample from Paul Lansky's Mild und Leise, and 50 minutes of Greenwood's improvisation edited down to a short section by Yorke. The production captures the exploding-beat sound of a club PA loud enough to damage hearing, all treble and percussion and no bottom.

The album uses guitar on most tracks, but never as the lead instrument. Ed O'Brien ran his guitar through sustain units, loopers and delay pedals to create synthesiser-like textures; Treefingers is his guitar loops processed into an ambient wash, no playing audible. The sequencing balances the synthetic and the acoustic: the Prophet-5 that opens the album gives way to the pedal organ that closes it, inspired by Tom Waits and early Disney soundtracks. The weakness is that some of the experiments are more interesting than memorable: Treefingers serves as an interlude but offers nothing on repeat, and the title track's vocoder melody is a trick that does not develop.

The album is sequenced like a statement: open with the thesis, follow with proof, place the ambient interlude exactly where the listener needs to breathe, close with the song Yorke wrote before Creep. The opener had to come first, and the band knew it; once that was decided, the rest followed. The third and eighth tracks are the album's peaks, both built on locked grooves and both chaotic in different ways, placed far enough apart that the tension does not collapse. The fourth track is the only song that sounds like it could have appeared on OK Computer, arriving late enough that the album has made its case but early enough to remind the listener what the band left behind.

The pacing sags slightly in the second half. The seventh track is solid but neither as abrasive as what follows nor as melodic as what precedes it, and it arrives at a point where the album needs a peak. The ninth track is stronger, with its stop-start drums and its cut-up lyrics about parking the car and cutting the kids in half, but it cannot carry the weight of being the penultimate track. The closer earns its seven-minute runtime by building slowly, adding harp samples and double bass until the arrangement sounds like a lullaby, but the hidden track that follows adds nothing. The album would be tighter at 45 minutes instead of 50, but the length is not filler, just the sound of a band learning what it needs to say.

Kid A sits just below OK Computer in the Radiohead catalog, and the gap is narrow. OK Computer is the more assured album, every song written to completion before the band entered the studio; Kid A is the more radical one, built from scraps and loops and sequences that Yorke assembled at random. The earlier album is the one to start with if you want to hear Radiohead as a guitar band at full strength. This one is the album that explains what came after: In Rainbows, The King of Limbs, A Moon Shaped Pool.

It is not a pleasant listen in the way OK Computer can be pleasant, and it will not reward listeners who want verse-chorus-verse and a hook they can sing. The album aged better than anyone expected in 2000. The electronic influences that sounded like a band chasing Warp and Autechre now sound like a band that understood where guitar rock was headed and walked away before the collapse. The vocal processing that sounded like affectation now sounds like a choice, Yorke using his voice as texture because the songs needed texture, not confession.

The fans who dismissed it as pretentious on release have mostly come around; the ones who still call it derivative have not explained what it derives from. Start with Everything in Its Right Place and Idioteque and How to Disappear Completely. If those three tracks work, the rest of the album will follow. If they do not, go back to The Bends and stay there. After Kid A, hear Amnesiac, the album built from the same sessions and released a year later, which is looser and weirder and proves the band was not done experimenting."}"standoutTracks":"The album is sequenced like a statement: open with the thesis, follow with proof, place the ambient interlude exactly where the listener needs to breathe, close with the song Yorke wrote before Creep. The opener had to come first, and the band knew it; once that was decided, the rest followed. The third and eighth tracks are the album's peaks, both built on locked grooves and both chaotic in different ways, placed far enough apart that the tension does not collapse. The fourth track is the only song that sounds like it could have appeared on OK Computer, arriving late enough that the album has made its case but early enough to remind the listener what the band left behind.

The pacing sags slightly in the second half. The seventh track is solid but neither as abrasive as what follows nor as melodic as what precedes it, and it arrives at a point where the album needs a peak. The ninth track is stronger, with its stop-start drums and its cut-up lyrics about parking the car and cutting the kids in half, but it cannot carry the weight of being the penultimate track. The closer earns its seven-minute runtime by building slowly, adding harp samples and double bass until the arrangement sounds like a lullaby, but the hidden track that follows adds nothing. The album would be tighter at 45 minutes instead of 50, but the length is not filler, just the sound of a band learning what it needs to say."}