Kid A - review

IT IS DIFFICULT to describe to those weaned on trip-hop and hip-hop the terror of watching your idols degenerate into flabby, overpaid, self-loving millionaires, endlessly reproducing and rehashing their hits to keep them touring and having sex with seventeen year-olds.

It is partly this terror - that all our musical idols end up becoming side-shows - that inspired Radiohead to abandon the route that had been set before them. After their most acclaimed album, OK Computer, the band stopped promoting their material, refused to do interviews, stopped releasing singles and would not do any videos.

The album they released next, Kid A, was a watershed. The album arguably sounded the death knell for nineties guitar music. Although epic and complex, the lineage of Radiohead's earlier period is clearly traceable to the school of 'songwriting', as typified by such artists as Lennon and McCartney: conventional verse/chorus song structure; recorded in real time using multi-track equipment.

Kid A is radically different: Free flowing; ambient; largely electronic; recorded using computer based software; and influenced by a dance culture the band had turned to after feeling the limitations of a rock four piece.

'Everything in it's Right Place', the opening track on Kid A, is a particularly good example of the band's new direction. The whole piece is constructed around a repeated keyboard phrase played in irregular time (alternating bars of four and five, as far as I can tell!) on what sounds like a Rhodes organ. There are no real melodic shifts, and there is no episodic progression to a new musical idea. Instead, the organ gradually modulates and becomes more waspish, while Thom Yorke sings fragmented bits of ostensibly random lyrics which come to mean more with every listen: 'There are two colours in my head,' a blink-and-you'll-miss-it stab at limited world views.

The other stand-out track on the album, 'Idioteque', is similarly written. Again built around a keyboard phrase, but this time with an insistent beat that silences the rock journalists' claim that you can't dance to Radiohead. Here, however, the touching beauty comes largely from lyrics which perfectly convey the sheer weight of a world spinning wildly towards oblivion: 'I've seen too much/ I've seen it all/ you haven't seen it all… Ice age comin', Ice age comin'… this is really happening.' Spine-chilling beauty.

Kid A sees Radiohead writing generally more political music than they had done previously. In 'Optimistic', Yorke attacks - dare I say it! - Capitalism: 'the big fish eat the little ones/ not my problem, give me some.' This passionate yet succinct illustration of the way a 'realists' view of the world is destructive and self-propagating cannot fail to touch those of us who are not money-grabbing scumbags (see first paragraph).

This album is almost above critique. Radiohead are, as far as I am concerned, the most original and intelligent musicians working in the popular medium. This album will keep you listening for years and years. It is as perplexing and exciting to me now as it was when I first heard it, and it will continue to perplex and excite me until I'm on my deathbed. Which, if Thom Yorke is right, could be quite soon for all of us.

Dan Owens aka Admass, 08 June 2003