Kid A - Radiohead (2000)

Ideated From: “Essential winter albums” on Treble

Discog-ology: Going through an artist’s albums, or at least the ones I haven’t written up yet, in order. Hopefully will be about once a week.

It’s a pretty typical arc for most artists to start out as innovators and rule breakers but then gradually become more conventional hit-makers. Radiohead are one of the odd examples who went the opposite way. Their first album was cookie-cutter alt-rock, and they leveraged their success into more freedom to branch into whatever they wanted.

Kid A is a statement to that effect.

The connection to winter is not hard to hear. The distant percussion, the ambient washes, and occasional use of drum machines and old-school synths make this a chilly record, even when it’s working up a sweat.

This is all over the place stylistically, but that seems to be on purpose. It’s probably not one of Radiohead’s best records, or even one of my favorites. But you can hear the them planting their flag to the claim that they are more than just a rock band, and that’s significant.

Tracks I liked:

Everything In Its Right Place - You can tell this record is different on the first track, where the vocal is set against a chopped up and heavily processed second vocal. There’s a lot going on and this is just getting started.

The National Anthem - If I made a list of “Ten Best Radiohead Tracks,” this is definitely on it. The locomotive rhythm section, the increasingly dissonant layers of horns, the wind chime harmonic effect on the vocal. It’s as close as the band has gotten to perfecting what they can do.

Optimistic - To say that this is an “old school” Radiohead track sounds a little weird, but the fact that this is the only song on their 4th record that would fit on their 2nd record just five years earlier says a lot about how fast the band was moving.