The second of October was the ten year anniversary of the release of Radiohead's seminal follow up to OK Computer; here Richard Wood looks at the album in detail, and examines why it is still held in such high regard.
After Radiohead ostensibly split the atom with their ultra-feted 1997 album OK Computer eyes were staring in their direction as never before. At this time it wasn’t quite known how perfectionist and depression-prone the band were and remain. The subsequent Grant Gee film Meeting People Is Easy revealed a band utterly repulsed by their own success, and for many it was where the band lost them. Despite having taken nearly a decade to fully acclimatise to their success and all its implications (2007’s In Rainbows was their most naturalistic work since ‘Computer) Kid A was a near-perfect album, and arguably their best ever. I make it my aim now to get to grips with the record’s most towering moments (songs), and to spend some words on album making more generally.
It is true that Kid A represents some of the finest sequencing of any album. Whatever their composite glories it’s the whole of an album which is appraised and truly great albums must master that quality of wholeness which eludes too much popular music. 'Everything in its Right Place' fades out and the 'Kid A' fades in; that song very quietly cedes it’s ambient slow motion groove to 'The National Anthem’s' caustic no-key bassline; it’s dissonance is subtly replicated in the string section which seethes in the opening bars of 'How to Disappear Completely'; 'Treefingers' allows for recollection of the senses post ‘Completely’s catharsis of misery; 'Optimistic’s' informal jam cuts almost imperceptibly into the similarly guitary 'In Limbo'; 'In Limbo' rears up, rebelling against its own stagnation and is washed away by crashing waves of audio-surf; Idioteque’s boiling, malevolent hysteria is followed by the anaemic, sickly prettiness of 'Morning Bell'; that nausea is cured by a terrible morose sadness, the closing: 'Motion Picture Soundtrack'.
'Everything in its Right Place' is one of Thom Yorke’s best realised songs in terms of how the lyrics and the music intermingle. The listener is placed somewhere in the consciousness of a dreaming Yorke, (“There are two colours in my head”) talking in his sleep (“What was that you tried to say?”) until finally waking, probably from a nightmare (“Tried to SAAYYYY!!!”) The lyrics unfold in a typically sketchy, sequential way; but the phrases are repeated over and over, and they compete with swarming loops of backwards vocals, incomprehensible but adding to the subconscious battle theme. Naively, perhaps, on first listen (I would have been about 15) it seemed to represent the future of pop composition; the repetitious lines: bizarre, heavily emphasised and obscurantist “Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon” etc. In fact many of the album’s lyrics are postmodernist fragments, sung in unusual measures or with technological obfuscation.
'The National Anthem' contains a nervous, spiky, roboticised Yorke singing in his now trademarked oblique phrases. His nerves are eventually confirmed by the onslaught of mad brass section with blows through the song’s riff-bassline and drumbeat with an uncommonly red-faced exuberance. That exuberance can seem misplaced given the song’s general stultification of expression; Yorke’s mewling, blanched vocal is tied to a metallic vocoder which pixelates his lyrics. But of course the brass band sequence is a stunning laugh-riot, and any complaints about a lack of thematic consistency deserve to be disregarded.
When critics reviewing it at the time compared it to Jazz composer Charles Mingus’ work I assumed it was just another one of those comparisons critics make which are often nonesensical, grasping at a remote similarity. Upon investigating Black Saint and the Sinner Lady however I was immediately transported back to memories of time spent pouring over those reviews. There is a clear line between that record’s intensity and the strived for replication here. Though Radiohead can’t really hope to remake the Mingus effect, in reaching for that style they achieve something not at all inferior. The first time you hear the bass trombone elbow its way into the mix it really is one of those rare head spinning moments, and what follows is a hornet’s nest of furious, dark jazz which rips open the affectless backing; all the while Yorke yells “it’s holding on!”
'Idioteque' works as something of a distillation of Radiohead’s mordent, modernist thesis. And it’s probably the song which most evokes the image of the album’s striking artwork created, as ever, by Stanley Donwood. The programming and signature looped sample create a none-more-bleak soundscape over which Yorke gives one of his most shrieking, fearful performances. His fecklessness-as-disaffection vocal style is perfectly suited to singing the lines which, despite their foggily enunciated delivery, leap out at the listener. “I laugh until my head comes off/swallow ’till I burst” very few singers could give this line the horror and impact Yorke does, most would sound quite ridiculous.
The panicked delirium of the chorus refrain “Here I’m alive, everything all of the time” seems to somehow evoke the essence of Yorke’s lyrical traits. The first part seems to want to declare the singer’s existence despite, like the majority of us, amounting to little more than an insignificant speck in terms of power; in that sense 'Idioteque' is the human spirit trapped beneath the horrific sentiments of Ok Computer’s 'Fitter, Happier'. The second half of the line confirms the overwhelming terror of modern existence; the hyper-industrialised, capitalist West ever more closely resembling (in character) a universe we know to be vast, uncaring and essentially hostile to human life.
Part Two of Richard's Kid A reflection come tomorrow...
Posted In Features, Oct 11 2010.
Words - Richard Wood