Kid A |
 |
Released: October 2, 2000 Peak: 11 US, 12 UK, 12 CN, 2 AU Sales (in millions): 1.48 US, 0.3 UK, 3.48 world (includes US and UK) Genre: experimental alternative rock |
Tracks: Song Title (date of single release, chart peaks) Click for codes to singles charts.
Total Running Time: 49:56 The Players:
|
Rating:  3.660 out of 5.00 (average of 20 ratings)
Quotable: “The weirdest album to ever sell a million copies, but it’s also a testament to just how complicated pop music can be.” – Josh Tyrangiel/ Alan Light, Time Awards: (Click on award to learn more).
|
About the Album: “Radiohead’s fourth album, released in October 2000, remains one of the more stunning sonic makeovers in music history. The band had the freedom to do whatever it wanted after its 1997 alt-rock breakthrough, OK Computer.” RS’20 Bassist Colin Greenwood said, “Everyone expected us to become this U2 type of band, with that stadium credibility.” RS’20 Instead, the band “said to hell with commercialism and put art in the driving seat.” FO While OK Computer is considered Radiohead’s ultimate masterpiece” EB Kid A is “the sound of the biggest band in the land reinventing itself before our eyes.” PM Lead singer Thom Yorke said the album was “like getting a massive eraser out and starting again.” RS’11 “After Kid A, everybody had to pay attention…It doesn’t want any fairweather fans or looky-loos screeching past.” FO “Rather than return to a straight ahead guitar sound after OK Computer, Radiohead went further down the experimental rabbit hole” TL “with a disc of complex electronic explorations.” EW’09 Yorke opted “to put down his guitar and embrace the glacial beauty of abstract electronics, glitchy beats, and the challenge of free-form composition.” RS’20 With producer Nigel Godrich, the band “created an enigma of slippery electronics and elliptical angst, sung by Yorke in an often indecipherable croon.” RS’11 He acknowledged that “It was difficult for the others [in the band], ’cause when you’re working with a synthesizer it’s like there’s no connection.” RS’20 “What emerged was at once scary and enveloping, pitched between deep alienation and profound tenderness.” RS’20 “It is rich and luxurious but supremely complex and highly textured.” FO This is “the weirdest album to ever sell a million copies, but it’s also a testament to just how complicated pop music can be.” TL With Kid A, “Radiohead made the first true rock of the future,” RS’11 “a new, uniquely fearless kind of rock record for a new, increasingly fearful century.” RS’20 It “has proved to be the band’s most influential record” EB and “easily the most successful electronica album from a rock band – it doesn’t even sound like a rock band, even if it does sound like Radiohead.” AMG Yorke himself said, ““I find it difficult to think of the path we’ve chosen as ‘rock music.’” RS’20 “From the spine-tingling four-note downward melody that opens Everything in Its Right Place” GU and its “womblike, ambient flow,” RS’20 “it was clear that Radiohead had taken a huge leap into colder, stranger territory.” GU “The heavily Cuisinarted voice of Thom Yorke declar[es] ‘Yesterday I woke up sucking on a lemon,’ and only gets cheerier from there.” TL “Cold to the core, Kid A made alienation sound so alluring.” EB This is the “opposite of easy listening” TL “Instead of simply adding club beats or sonic collage techniques, Radiohead strive to incorporate the unsettling ‘intelligent techno’ sound of Autechre and Aphex Twin” AMG by “embracing samplers, sequencers and, to the eternal dismay of drummer Phil Selway, a drum machine.” TL “To their immense credit, Radiohead don’t sound like carpetbaggers, because they share the same post-postmodern vantage point as their inspirations.” AMG The electronic influences that had filtered into OK Computer reached maturity – most spectacularly on techno anthem Idioteque.” GU With its “gizmo-groove paranoia” RS’20 it “seems to be about an evacuation or apocalypse, underscored by a driving and syncopated loop of electronic percussion and a moving set of four sampled chord inversions from avant-garde classical music.” PM “The closest thing to riffing…was the fuzz-bass lick” RS’11 in “the free-jazz implosion The National Anthem.” RS’20 It “rode a driving four-measure bass line to chaotic joy, allowing a group of eight saxophones and brass to play like a Mingus band on free-jazz amphetamines.” PM “Yorke’s loathing of celebrity inspired the contrary beauty” RS’11 of the “delicate and shimmering” PM How to Disappear Completely, “with its watery orchestration and his voice flickering in and out of earshot.” RS’11 Meanwhile, “the guitars in Morning Bell sounded more like seabirds” RS’11 and Yorke’s “electronically squished pleading in Kid A sounded like a baby kicking inside a hard drive.” RS’11 “OK Computer required many plays before revealing the intricacies of its densely layered mix; here, multiple plays are necessary…to get a handle on quiet, drifting, minimally arranged songs with no hooks.” AMG “Of course, the natural reaction of any serious record geek is that if the music demands so much work, it must be worth it – and at times, that supposition is true.” AMG “About half of the songs positively shimmer with genius,” AMG but Kid A is “self-consciously alienating and difficult.” AMG For some that will mean that “your tenth listen is better than your first and your hundredth best of all.” PM For others, the album may come across as seeming “deeper than it actually is.” AMG
Notes: A collector’s edition of the album added a second disc of live recordings. |
Resources and Related Links:
Other Related DMDB Pages: 
First posted 3/23/2008; last updated 6/2/2022. |
No comments:
Post a Comment