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KID A
Radiohead
(Capitol / EMI)
Kid A already has quite a reputation to live up to.
This fourth album from British alt-rock gods Radiohead is easily the most insanely overhyped disc of the year. Months before anyone heard it, fans on the Internet began buzzing that Kid A was "amazing," "one of the best albums of the year," and, even more outrageously, "one of the best albums ever."
Well, two out of three ain't bad. Kid A probably isn't going to dethrone Sgt. Pepper or Dark Side of the Moon as a pop-music touchstone. But it will top plenty of critics' year-end lists. Because, yes, it is pretty damn amazing. Not to mention ambitious, sweeping, grand, challenging, innovative, cinematic, daunting, freaky, cerebral and a whole load of superlatives.
Here's one more: Original. Strikingly, head-scratchingly original. Both as a Radiohead album and as a major-label release, Kid A is a drastic departure -- an eerie, futuristic soundscape-concept album-song cycle hybrid that all but abandons traditional rock-music songcraft, arrangement and instrumentation for electronic experimentation and avant-garde ambient cybernetics. Kid A is so alien, so otherworldly, so inhuman it could be the first album recorded by computer program. Or by a paranoid android.
Or a clone. In one of the few clues singer Thom Yorke has dropped, he has said Kid A refers to the first human clone. That fits with the disc's dark narrative, which seems like one of Philip K. Dick's twisted sci-fi novels -- something about genetically engineered humans trapped in a bleak, dystopian future, facing global apocalypse from an encroaching Ice Age. At least, that's what we hear in Yorke's impenetrable lyrics, which fall somewhere difference between Japanese haiku and Burroughsian cutup: "Everyone / Everyone around here / Everyone is so near / And so alone / So alone." And that's one of the more sensible bits. We're still trying to decipher rhyme-free verses like, "Everything in its right place / Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon / There are two colours in my head / What was that you tried to say?" For their part, Radiohead aren't much help; the CD's hidden book holds a jumble of words that's a Where's Waldo? version of a lyric sheet.
Kid A's 10-song musical soundtrack can be equally confounding. It barely resembles the work of the band responsible for Creep, Anyone Can Play Guitar and Fake Plastic Trees. In fact, considering this quintet has two guitarists, there's an astonishing lack of guitar on Kid A -- the first noticable strumming doesn't occur until the fourth track, a dreamy, Floydian slice of denial and paranoia called How to Disappear Completely. Most of Kid A is built upon a shifting foundation of squiggly synths and ambient, pillowy oscillations that bear a striking resemblance to the work of electronic avant-gardists such as Aphex Twin or u-ziq. Only three tracks remotely resemble traditional songs: National Anthem, which jerks along to a lumpy, Morphine-like bass line and honking sax riff; Idioteque, a sharp shard of freeze-dried techno; and Optimistic, a U2-ish piece of midtempo majesty that boasts the album's most memorable chorus: "You can try the best you can / The best you can is good enough."
But despite its icy veneer and inscrutability, Kid A isn't off-putting. Rather, like a finely crafted novel, it draws you into its complex web. With every listen, something new rises out of the murk -- another layer of sound, another snippet of Yorke's bleating vocals, another piece of the narrative puzzle. And each new clue sends you back to the beginning in hopes that this time, Kid A will give finally give up its secrets. So far -- for us at least -- it hasn't. We doubt it ever will.
That ability to hook a listener is the best any album can do. And in this case, it's more than good enough to earn Kid A a decent shot at album of the year.
Track Listing
1. "Everything In Its Right Place" (4:10)
2. "Kid A" (4:44)
3. "The National Anthem" (5:52)
4. "How To Disappear Completely" (5:55)
5. "Treefingers" (3:42)
6. "Optimistic" (5:16)
7. "In Limbo" (3:31)
8. "Idioteque" (5:09)
9. "The Morning Bell" (4:29)
10. "Motion Picture Soundtrack" (7:03)