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Radiohead Kid A Average Rating: 
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If you like "Kid A", you might also like ...
OK Computer |
Amnesiac |
The Bends |
Hail to the Thief |
In Rainbows |
| Customer Reviews 1-5 of 2033 | NEXT >> |
2009-01-02Keep an open mind when you buy this. I did and I promise, my brains didnt fall out! I love this album, it's a breathtaking experience listening to it. buy it.
2008-08-25This is the best album cover ever in rock and roll history as far as I'm conserned, the music inside is just gravy. Nothing could top OK Computer, so Radiohead didnt even try - they very wisely went in a completely diffrent direction into almost another genre altogether. OK Computer is basicaly a straight up rock record but Kid A is pretty much electronic music. The first song, "Everything in it's Right Place" is one of the best in Radiohead's live set - it sounds much better live is what I'm trying to say - but the studio version is still very captivating, especially with good speakers. "How To dissappear Completely" almost matches the intensity of "Exit Music" from the previvous record. I think the peak of the record is "In Limbo", maybe the scariest song I've ever heard from a major rock band and that includes Pink Floyd. Another thing I like about this record is that it has a character; some albums are a collection of songs with no discernable unifying theme or common identity, but on this record, from beggining to end, it is definately Kid A.
2008-07-11It's almost tragic, in a way, the first time you hear an album as magnificent, visceral, and life-changing as Kid A; tragic because you just know you're never going to get the same feelings from an album ever again.
I was a casual Radiohead fan in nineth grade when I desided to pick up Kid A. I was first drawn to the more imediately catchy tracks on the album (The National Anthem, Optimistic, etc.), but ultimately I didnt grow to love it as much as I do untill I went to college, where my obsession with this album led to a complete reevaluation of my music tastes, leading me to explore more experimental and electronic music.
It's hard to explain in words the impact Kid A has on me. I can't listen to it without having certain moods, feelings, and memories being brought out of me. The first few seconds of the first track, Everything in its Right Place, push me into this amazing mental space every time I hear it. The track "Kid A" has these calming nursery sounds that melt into a pulsating muffled rhythm from the future. The National Anthem, with its "trafic-jam" orchestra sections crashing over the catchy, rolling bass line. The beautiful, eerie acoustic How to dissappear Completely. The ambience of Treefingers, the epic rock anthem Optimistic, the underwater acid trip In Limbo, the danceable stuttered rhythms of Idioteque... I can go on for pages.
Kid A is the perfect album. Every song is incredable. The album takes a little time to sink in, not so little that the hooks become boring but not so much that the album becomes too difficult and asthetically awkward. No track goes on for longer than you would like, no sound seems misplaced. Everything seems to, well, fall into the right place.
I cannot overstress the brilliance of this album and recomend it to anyone who enjoys music. Kid A is approaching its tenth birthday and has only become more musically relevent over the years in this music reviewer's oppinion. If you haven't heard Kid A, do yourself a favor and buy a copy of one of the best records of all time.
2008-07-07To examine Kid A's influence (and it is influencial), let's look at "The National Anthem." This song starts with a simple bass line, not even a bass line so much as a very basic bass rhythm. This rhythm is then played unswervingly for the rest of the song. No other melodic elements are ever added. Where a rock band might gradually raise the tension with a developing guitar solo, where a club-oriented dance band might build up many diffrent layers to crescendo, Radiohead adds a whole bunch of blaring trumpets, squealing cacophonously all at the same time all of a sudden. The suprise and the volume attempt to make up for the lack of music.
In recent years, this sort of thing occurrs all the time in popular music, when albums are largely defined by the adjectives assigned to them in reviews or interviews, and their musical content consists of very common, basic stamps, simple stand-ins for the explanations offered in the reviews and interviews. You know the type, when "musical diversity" means that someone bought a couple of exotic instruments, strummed a few idle and disconnected notes, then tweaked them in ProTools untill they sounded palatable. "Making nonsense seem profound," to paraphrase the editorial blurb, is the defining quality of popular music throughout the 2000s. If you want to see the downside of Kid A's influence, listen to something like Blur's 2002 album Think Tank. "Crazy Beat" is a more ingratiating take on "The National Anthem," based on the same exact kind of dull repetetion.
This approach is heavily inspired by the "artistic" trend in nineties electronica: Aphex Twin, Autechre, Bjork, etc. This type of music was already extremly suseptible to adjectives and mystique, even in the nineties. Look at some of the essays written about the Warp Records catalog in the early nineties, and you'll see what I mean. Kid A synthesized many of those sounds and made them mainstream. Put Bjork in front of the microphone in "Motion Picture Soundtrack," and you get an absolutely typical example of one of her "harpsichord songs" like "Cover Me" or "Like Someone In Love," where she sings over incidental strumming. "Idioteque" recalls Autechre with a mechanical dance beat that you can't dance to, with a few dissonant, droning synth waves (again, no other melodic elements) layed on top. And just about any electronic band has done something like "Treefingers," a moody ambient drone with no musical progression.
The title track, in parituclar, is a flawless Aphex imitation. He did this kind of playful/wistful music-box lead many times, both before Kid A ("In The Glitter Part 2" from 26 Mixes For Cash) and after it ("Nannou," on the Windowlicker EP). The distorted, croaking vocals, half-creepy and half-innocent, as well as the jittery drumbeat, are also straight out of his playbook. I guess it's a testament to how deeply Radiohead buried themselves in the part. But, in Radiohead's hands, this stuff became oblique enough for countless adjectives, and sounded serious enough to create mystique.
The best musical moments occurr in the mid-tempo tracks, where it's possable to ease into the mood and zone out. "Everything In Its Right Place" is quite orginal in the way the moody piano is arranged into an oscillating loop, backed by buzzing vocal samples and Yorke's neurotic lead. "How To dissappear Completely" takes the quiet acoustic guitar from "Exit Music For A Film," and adds whale-song synths to match the drifting vocals -- pretty and detailled for a rock band, inventive for a techno band. "Optimistic" also has a pretty simple guitar line, but the agressive rhythm section creates a powerfull churn. 'Churn' is one of those meaningless rock-journalist words, but here it's apt. There's a chaotic and ramshackle feel to the song that gives it the energy that was lacking in "The National Anthem." Of all the songs on the album, this one is closest in spirit to OK Computer. "In Limbo" is quieter, back to drift mode, but keeps that chaotic churn, now given form by a faint keyboard line.
Take those four tracks, add "Kid A," and you have five very good songs that genuinely make use of some of the strenghts of Warp-style electronica. But the album's reputation claims so much more. The lyrics play a key role in the mystique of Kid A, and here too, we run into some trouble.
Lyrically, Yorke's focus has constricted to oblique, demonstrative statements of isolation, things like obsessively repeating, "there are two colours in my head." OK Computer is also an introspective album, but most of it somehow reacts to the outside world: to lovers ("Exit Music For A Film," "Lucky"), politicians ("Electioneering"), insufficently sensitive bourgeois ("Fitter Happier," "The Tourist"), or outside events ("Airbag"). By contrast, Kid A shuts out everyone and everything other than Yorke. The only reaction Yorke has to anyone other than himself is stated in the first song: "What, what was that you tried to say?" Any possibilty of meaningful communciation is imediately, categorically denied.
Yorke's exclusion of the outside world is so total that it begins to sound very deliberate. The lonelyness of modern man is no longer enough to explain it. It takes a sustained, deliberate effort to drown out the outside world so completely. This type of thing has its appeal, in one's self-pitying moments ("the best you can is good enough," Yorke reassures in "Optimistic"), but it's important to realize that it's not all that sympathetic. And then, one can't help but get a bit fidgety. Gentle reader, are you really patient enough to want to help someone who seems to delight in rebuffing your efforts?
Kid A is not so much an "experimental" work as it is a collection of many then-contamporary ideas in electronic music. In a way, it set the tone for the decade. However, one might wonder if that was entirely a good thing.
2008-05-29This may be the best album I've ever heard. The first five notes are simpley the most arresting announcement of a sea change for a band that I know. When this was released, it was instantly the most important popular (admittedly, a dubious title) album on the planet. That it only lasts about 60 minutes (when it easily could have been crammed to the brink with the outtakes that later comprised the comparitively weaker and less mysterous [read: Kid A could not have been equaled or surpassed] Amnesiac) is instead a testament to its cohesiveness. It is the only album I own that I almost never interupt to select individual songs.
As for the mistery, it is rampant and lovely: Who is Kid A? What is he or she (or, most likely, it) the product of? What is the year? Does the cover depict a landscape or a soundscape? Are those the same thing?
I could go on. I won't.
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| Editorial Review |
With every record, Radiohead jump off higher and higher cliffs, daring fans to take the plunge in their artistic feats of derring-do. The journey from that scratchy bit of raw guitar angst in "Creep" (from 1993's Pablo Honey) to any song on Kid A amounts to a high-wire act that few, if any, bands in popular music have ever attempted. It's hard to believe both records come from the same planet, much less the same band. Likewise, the grandiose, Pink Floyd-esque thematic scope of 1997's extraordinary OK Computer is nowhere to be found here. Quiet, contemplative, and less confrontational, it opens with a lack of bombast, as "Everything in Its Right Place" builds tension with ghostly voiceovers, a dry pulse, and a shadowy organ motif. That tension appears over and over on Kid A. On "How to Disappear Completely," the unsettled, atonal keyboard waxing in the background offsets the plaintive Thom Yorke vocal, and on "Idioteque," detached, inorganic rhythms make the melody's despondent aimlessness that much more nerve-racking. Throughout, Radiohead fearlessly explore dissonance and structure, melding twisted, Brian Eno-meets-Aphex Twin sonic landscapes with utter discontent in the world around them. They may sometimes overreach, letting artsy ambition prevent them from giving us the arena rock-god goodies. But their commitment to restless creativity also yields pleasures that don't fade but instead become more resonant upon repeated listenings. If OK Computer was rock's most relevant expression of millennial angst, Kid A is the opposite; it's the 21st century's first record that sounds like the future, barely caring what that Y2K fuss was all about and much more worried about what the hell we're all supposed to do now. --Matthew Cooke
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More from Radiohead
 OK Computer |  The Bends |  Hail To The Thief |
 Pablo Honey |  Amnesiac |  Airbag/How Am I Driving? |
UK version of their highly anticipated fourth album with a limited edition 'special booklet'. 10 tracks including, 'Everything In It's Right Place','Kid A' and 'The National Anthem'. 2000 release. Standard jewel case.
The Most Anticipated and Uniquely Marketed Album of the New Millenium. Eschewing Most of their Conventions, Radiohead have Reinvented their Music from the Ground Up. Their Approach Has Been Hailed as Having Produced the First Masterpiece of the Year. While it May Take Some Time to Absorb, Repeated Listenings Yield Deep Aural Pleasure.
If you like "Kid A", you might also like ...
|
OK Computer |
Amnesiac |
The Bends |
Hail to the Thief |
In Rainbows |
