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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Is this really an "important" record? Four critics duke it out.
Oct 25, 2000 | Andrew Goodwin: The critic Theodor Adorno, dismayed by the possibilities for classical structures in a broken world, once argued that "art of the highest caliber pushes beyond totality towards a state of fragmentation." He wasn't writing about rock music in the 21st century. And he didn't write the liner notes for "Kid A." But his words were, as ever, prescient in the extreme.
Alongside Oasis, Elastica, Pulp and Blur, Radiohead were one of five candidates to head up the so-called British Invasion of the 1990s, and if Blur's Damon Albarn isn't choking on his press cuttings right now, I for one will be surprised. Like Blur, Radiohead took one look at "success" and decided to rewrite the rule book.
Think about it. Elastica? Six years to follow up their debut album, and they come back with ... more of the same. Pulp? The inspiration for a thousand sad bedroom soliloquies have been silent for over two years. Oasis? Their implosion was as ugly as it was predictable. Only Blur and Radiohead have lasted the course; and their tactics, like U2 before them, consisted of following up a brace of smash-hit records with a barrage of dirty, spaced-out noise.
To read the reviews, you might imagine that Thom Yorke has invented a totally new kind of music, rewritten the rules of tonality and taken the tools of multitracking to a new level. He has done no such thing. That Yorke has been listening to Aphex Twin is no secret -- the influence of Richard James on this material is transparent. If you are a rock fan looking for new kicks, for something more shocking than the sound of the Gallagher brothers disappearing up their own Beatletudes, then "Kid A" will surprise you.
Radiohead
"Kid A"
Capitol
Otherwise, you will hear an uneven collection of songs weighed down by a paradoxical combination of overambition and underproduction. Some of it is brilliant -- expect "Idioteque" and "Optimistic" to feature in Radiohead set lists for years to come. Some of it is mundane: Listen to the faux-jazz screeching of "The National Anthem" next to the inspired honking of Primal Scream's similar exercise, "Blood Money" (from "Exterminator"), and be embarrassed -- be very, very embarrassed.
The first five notes of the first song, "Everything in Its Right Place," seduce so compellingly that you find yourself listening to the entire album just for the thrill of going back to the beginning. And they also sum up the whole gig. A magical hint of a 1970s Fender Rhodes electric piano lures us in, but with enough synthetic edge to announce something beyond nostalgia. Is it old? Is it new? No, it is something borrowed -- the oldest trick in the Book of Rock. This is the Art Move. Radiohead have replaced rollicking power chords and anthemic stadium chants with ambiguities and fragments. This is the pop equivalent of cinema's Dogme 95 and Brit Lit's New Barbarians -- strip it down, sort it out, detonate the bombast. It is a new thing, and an old thing -- the album as its own remix.
The lyrics are a Rorschach test. What do you hear? "I've lost my way." "You can try the best you can/The best you can is good enough." "I'm here in the studio, suffering for my art/My bandmates are down the pub, drinking beer and playing darts." These lines quite possibly exist somewhere in the mix, buried beneath backward-masked voices, clapped-out beat-boxes and arrangements that suggest, rather comically at times, that the rump of the band repeatedly abandoned Yorke and his producer Nigel Godrich in the middle of a song.
The Beatles invented the (modernist) Art Move. And indeed, "Kid A" does bear comparison with "Sgt. Pepper" on at least two counts. First, it is the most anticipated release in a decade -- albeit for a lost tribe of rock fans whose numbers and confidence in themselves have declined precipitously. Second, "Kid A" is a fine and confused piece of work endangered by the overwrought criticism heaped upon it. We should not blame Yorke for this; we might want to have a word with the Radiohead PR machine, but they, after all, are only doing their jobs. Probably this is nothing more than a hackneyed concept album about cloning -- 40-something minutes of music to follow up on 1997's seven-minute epic, "Paranoid Android."
Soon enough, no doubt, Radiohead will surprise us one more time, with a grungy, in-your-face, hook-laden Rock Move. Meantime, there's Poor Thom, fretting on his guitar, strutting at the mike. He's consumed with anguish about his role as the savior of rock -- I must zig when they zag, he thinks, determined not to let stardom undermine his mission to shock. But his fears are unfounded. Radiohead are a good band, but they're not that important. "Kid A" is a fine album. Rather than losing sleep, Yorke might just realize that until he writes a record as strong as "Definitely Maybe," "Parklife" or "Different Class," the anguish is all for naught.
Michelle Goldberg: Until I heard "Kid A," I thought Radiohead were overrated. Sure, I was enraptured by the supersaturated pathos of "Fake Plastic Trees" from the 1995 album "The Bends," but except for the rushing triumph of the song "Let Down," the much-heralded magic of "OK Computer" eluded me. When that record came out there was a lot of hype about it making rock relevant again. Maybe because I'm part of the first generation in decades that's not defined by rock -- since, that is, its death doesn't presage my own -- I've always thought that if rock needed to be saved so badly, perhaps it didn't deserve to be.
"OK Computer" was celebrated in part for articulating a futuristic, dystopian anxiety, but drum 'n' bass, hip-hop and trip-hop have been doing that for years. I suspect part of the reason so many rock critics swooned over the album was because it took a contemporary sense of dazed, pained disorientation and expressed it in an old, comfortable idiom.
On "Kid A," though, Radiohead have reworked their musical language altogether. The record is a panicked, gritty, gurgling mélange of droning rock, electronic effects and jazz freakouts, full of strange, aching beauty. Unlike musicians such as Tori Amos and Madonna, who have simply injected electronic beats into their work to bring it up to date, Radiohead have created something that transcends fashionable pastiche. There are moments where "Kid A" recalls other records -- the lullaby synth melodies on the title track are intensely reminiscent of the genius German electronic minimalist B. Fleischmann, while the hypnotic guitar grind and wild horn stabs of "The National Anthem" are pure Death in Vegas. As a whole, though, the album sounds like nothing else out there, at once dazzlingly experimental and intensely lovely, delicate and grandiose.
Yet while "Kid A" is a big stylistic departure for the band, it captures the same sense of vulnerability and paralysis in the face of frenzied, overwhelming change that coursed through "OK Computer." It's more powerful, though, because here the terror and yearning in Yorke's reedy singing is echoed so powerfully by the music's very structure. On the first song, "Everything in Its Right Place," his voice seems to be struggling through something viscous and suffocating, while fuzzy echoes, funereal keyboards and warped, choppy vocal samples conjure confused ennui. It embodies the insomniac, brain-whirling feeling that's one of the worst side effects of living at unprecedented velocity.
The song "Kid A" is similarly both unnerving and stunning. With its beguiling toy-piano melody, diaphanous sound washes, submerged drums and robotically processed vocals, the song combines icy bleakness with tenderness, suggesting a beloved child reluctantly brought into an unforgiving world. Again on "Idioteque," which begins with a tired break beat but turns ravishing with the addition of Yorke's slurred, devastated, looped and layered singing, Radiohead render creeping unease and desolation incandescent. I'm reminded of Joy Division, another band that alchemized gloomy, banal alienation into crepuscular beauty. "Kid A" is one of the loneliest records I've heard in ages. Perhaps because of that, it's also one of most comforting.
