Radiohead - Kid A (2000)

1) Everything in Its Right Place; 2) Kid A; 3) The National Anthem; 4) How to Disappear Completely; 5) Treefingers; 6) Optimistic; 7) In Limbo; 8) Idioteque; 9) Morning Bell; 10) Motion Picture Soundtrack

The famous reinvention. Not as radical to modern ears but it's hard to argue this didn't leave an impact and changed Radiohead forever. And it remains great. 

Key tracks: "Everything in Its Right Place", "The National Anthem", "How to Disappear Completely"

Kid A is an album with a Legacy. It’s defined by its origin story and cultural context so much that the music largely comes secondary: notice how Kid A is mostly talked about as a whole, rather than as individual songs. It’s the story of a rock band whose sound defined the late 90s abandoning all that, taking their music into a whole new world and who then ended up defining rock music as a whole afterwards. By now artists going electronic is a trope we’ve come to expect during the lifetime of every guitar band and it wasn’t exactly rare before Kid A either (see 1998, the year bands seemed to collectively discover samplers and synthesizers) but Radiohead’s open love for IDM and the sheer conviction they threw themselves out into the new world with – not to mention their global size at the time – changed gears forevermore. Add some flair about the usage of internet in its infancy and the disconnection and chaos the band themselves felt about what they were doing, and you’ve got the ingredients to a perfect analytical album retrospective. Even if it’s not all true, it sounds plausible enough to be so.

It’s not unusual for context-specific significance to fade away for those who come to the artefact later on down the line, having become used to the effects of the revolution. No one who’s gone through Modern Rock 101 would expect Kid A to sound as wild now as it did back then, even back when I got into this roughly a decade ago. Well, it does – kind of. It’s still a significant album in Radiohead’s discography. But there’s this nagging feeling at the back of your head whenever you listen to it, especially when you first put it on after all the raving and story-building and one which you can never shake fully even after you’ve come to readjust your views. Wasn’t this supposed to be an electronic album?

Kid A is more like a hedging-your-bets kind of transitionary album than the genre revolution it’s made out to be. Amnesiac took the full dive and Hail to the Thief moulded it all together but Kid A is still clearly the work of the same band who made OK Computer, logically progressing from one point to the next. A lot of guitar, a lot of conventional band playing, a lot of the same songwriting you’ve come to expect. The much touted electronic elements aren’t even the best part of the album. “Everything in Its Right Place” is really good but fizzles out into nothing rather than keeps its momentum, “Treefingers” goes all ambient but is ultimately an interlude and the parallel universe dance anthem “Idioteque” is great until you hear any of its live versions and discover how disappointingly flat the album version is. Only the glacial IDM gallop “Kid A” feels like a great idea meeting a fully fleshed out production. It’s the moment where your expectations meet reality, and it’s great.

But Kid A is an excellent album nonetheless. If conjures a soundscape of isolation and ice-cold otherworldliness perfectly – someone once said the cover art is like looking at a forest fire from a distance, observing the chaos from afar in silence, and it’s a great way to describe the album’s atmosphere. It’s filled with anxiety, terror and horror (“we’re not scare-mongering, this is really happening”) but it’s distanced from all of it, wrapped up in its isolation chamber and covering all the panic with a cool detachment. Here and there the shield breaks down – the soul-crushing existential loneliness of “How to Disappear Completely”, the bits of “Idioteque” where it almost goes mental (and would, without the production stopping it) – but Kid A picks itself back up quickly, fixes the front and returns to its wintery solitude. Radiohead have made a career out of standing at the verge of madness – here they sound calm and at ease, in a manner more disconcerting than when they’re about to break down.

The bit about no one ever mentioning Kid A’s songs makes sense the more you tug into the album. It’s not album where titles jump out of the tracklist in a “that is my jam” kind of way, but it’s a tracklist where each song knows its place in the greater whole. The “Optimistic”/”In Limbo” duo is the perfect example. “Optimistic” throws away any notion of this being an electronic album with what it being a rifftastic rock band effort and it’s nowhere near among Radiohead’s best in that regard, but its relative loudness and brashness acts as an excellent foil to the rest of the album and it sounds far better in its right place than it does out of it. “In Limbo” is effectively an extended outro that had the audacity to try to morph into its own song and it’s a little too formless to make it fully work, but it’s hard to not get wrapped in its groove when it slyly appears on the album. It’s a cliché but Kid A is first and foremost an album rather than a selection of songs, and the sum is far greater than the parts ever will be individually. That’s not to say that it doesn’t have songs that wouldn’t be great on their own. “Kid A” is an exciting glimpse into what the album could be, “How to Disappear Completely” is a spine-chilling classic and arguably Radiohead’s greatest “ballad” (“mood piece” is probably a better term), “The National Anthem” is one hell of a groove-monster you would not expect this album to contain, coming with an instant classic bass riff, and “Morning Bell” finds the band taking the sound elements of the title track and applying them onto a rock song in fantastic, hypnotic results.

None of it’s really revolutionary. In fact, you can hear traces of them all in Radiohead’s prior works and they’re only now becoming realized. Kid A’s supposed genre shift feels more and more out of place the more you listen to it, the more you listen to Radiohead and the more you listen to music. There’s countless albums that have been branded with “X’s Kid A” that actually do the Kid A thing better than the real deal does. But the more you listen to the album and the more you listen to Radiohead, the more it’s clear that the shift is mostly in the personal level. Whether or not it’s radical in how it does it, this album is where Radiohead re-wrote their own rulebook and took a new approach to writing and playing music that they still hold onto today. As an album it’s not quite the 90s gloom rock as the ones prior or the twitched-up art rock of the albums after, happily mediating in the middle. As a bridge it works perfectly – for so many people this was the album that made them realise sides of the band they’d never thought about and opened the way onwards, myself included. The legacy and the hype might not quite hit the nail on the head then, but it still holds an important place in the band’s history and in people’s record collections. That, however, is because of the music within and the overall experience the ten songs work together to bring.

Rating: 8/10