The eagerly anticipated Kid A, Radiohead's jarring fourth album, is being released today. It comes nearly four years after OK Computer, the Grammy Award-winning record that sold five million copies and cemented the band's status as the preeminent rock band from the United Kingdom. The quintet from Oxford began to feature keyboards and synthesizers on OK Computer, and the electronic elements dominate on the follow-up, which clocks in with ten tracks, at less than 50 minutes.
Singer and guitarist Thom Yorke, the group's songwriter, has traded catchy melodies and accessible lyrics for something altogether different, altogether less hummable. Nonetheless, it's the group's best album yet. In a time of boy bands, music that makes drunken people scream, and nausea-inducing rockers/rappers, the album does its part to redefine the rock band, and maybe just save it.
Kid A embraces the technology Thom Yorke's past lyrics anxiously feared. If OK Computer was a concept album responding to the advent of technology with alienation and paranoia, Kid A overcomes that sentiment with a fierce vengeance, while also exhibiting sheer indifference to the pressures placed on the band since it's huge success. It's a transcendental liquid sound, epic on galactic proportions, a bright vision that could herald in a new era for rock music. Or, as my neighbor commented, it sounds like music you'd play while sacrificing children.
"I think we managed somehow to bend the machines to our will - that's what we did together, as a band," guitarist Jonny Greenwood told the New York Times Magazine in an article published this past Sunday.
"Optimistic" is the only guitar-driven rock song on the album. It's the radio song and the easiest to envision being performed live. You're not quite sure how the band could bring to stage a full-scale orchestra ("How to Disappear"), a horn section ("The National Anthem"), or Yorke's voice played backwards ("Everything in its Right Place"). The band's live re-creations of its new songs, however, are reportedly stunning. Greenwood "played" a transistor radio at a Copenhagen show, and band members operate sampling machines to capture and distort Yorke's voice during performance.
The sweeping changes didn't come easily. Yorke was reportedly having a rock star nervous breakdown in the afterglow of OK Computer. Some members thought the band should make a back-to-basics guitar album like The Bends. Band members sat on the sidelines fiddling with computers while Yorke sang. So much material was recorded that the band will release a more "commercially-acceptable" album in the spring.
Two of the more decipherable lyrics on the album are "I'm not here, this is not happening," from the beautifully subdued "How to Disappear," and "This is really happening," from "Idioteque," one of the best songs on the album, with a dance beat that is unprecedented for the band thus far. The songs range from blithely calm to urgently frenetic. If judged independently, the ten songs seem to violently contradict each other and not fit together. Listened to as a whole, they coalesce into a coherent piece of work.
"Kid A," the title track, is the most impenetrable song on the album, as it does more squeaking then anything else. It lacks any sort of conventional song structure, and any attempt to grasp onto its elements is futile. You won't get it. Yorke's voice is distorted beyond any recognition. For the first time, the band omits lyrics in the liner notes for the album that they're most needed.
"Motion Picture Soundtrack," the final track, was going to be included on OK Computer, and an earlier version exists featuring just Yorke and an acoustic guitar, where his voice dominates the song. The track on Kid A is drastically altered, where an organ and something that sounds like a wind chime dominate Yorke's lyrics to the point at which they're almost indiscernible. Without his voice - at times the only thing on the CD that smacks of past Radiohead - the song would be New Age church music. The first acoustic version could have been played on the radio; the second one can't be.
Radiohead handled its commercial and critical success quite gracefully. It didn't break up, go solo, sell-out, or release a bad album. Its members are taking full advantage of their first-class status: the band will release no singles, make no music videos, and their small European tour will end soon, with no US appearances scheduled, except for Saturday Night Live on Oct. 14, and a show in Los Angeles.
The past three albums thrived partly because nearly every track could be argued as the best on the record. You can memorize all the lyrics, and slam the beat on the steering wheel as you drive. With Kid A, Radiohead's "White Album," skipping around isn't as satisfying and some songs would never be put on a mix tape. It's a foreign concept these days, but listen to the songs in the order the band intended them to be heard, and you won't be disappointed.
