Taking Sides - Amnesiac vs. Kid A

Kid Amnesiac

I mean, all that bass and drums and brass... Can't get much more electronic than that.

Hmmmm.. I think I can see where you're going with this. I'd been a seriously rabid Warp fan for some time before Kid A came out and on hearing it I couldn't decide whether it was good that they'd gone down this path or whether they had created some kind of Blue Nun of electronic music. Treefingers works as a mood piece or just as basic ambient music but it doesn't really do very much and its attempt to ape SAWII just seems tokenistic.
Kid A sounds and the National Anthem also sound a little immature. It sounded like Thom had picked up on Windowlicker then bought the entire Warp catalogue and thought "I want to sound like this now" but not really known how to go about it.
How To Disappear Completely just hangs in the air quite pleasantly but Thom's self indulgence starts to bleed through.

The second half of the album is much better and tracks like Optimistic and Idiotheque are much more realised.

I think if I'd have been about 16/17 when Kid A came out I'd have been amazed with it in the same way I fell in love with Giant Steps for being an eclectic rock album. Sadly I'd already started reading ILM so there was no going back.

On Amnesiac, yes it has some very good tracks "You And Whose Army?", "Pyramid Song" and "Life In A Glasshouse" particularly. "Knives Out" sounds like a boring retread of "Karma Police" with a very shit video to boot. Never liked the album version of "Spinning Plates" and yeh the album seems to lose itself quite quickly on the second half, only being resolved with the last song.

If Kid A and Amnesiac had been released as a double album I'd say it was Radiohead at their most adventurous and that they'd made some kind of sprawling prog-epic up there with the White Album and Mellon Collie. With double albums you can get away with a few experiments. But somehow splitting them in two cheapens them and shows up the less succesful moments on the album. This is because if you've spent £13.99 on an eleven track rock album and four of those tracks are IDM experiments, ambient mood pieces and dubious filler then you're going to feel ripped off. If you buy a rock double album for £16.99 and it's abrim with new and exciting ideas from rock to electronica, brass bands, dixie horns, bells and whistles, you'd hail it as an epic.

I wish I had these albums on me now, they remind me of university.

Does that make sense? I'm not feeling too literate this morning.

Shame both years were shite though.

A double-album of both records would make no difference. One single album, with the best of both and all the filler trimmed off, would rule. (Like everyone else in the world I compiled my own one in like 2001).

xpost - dudes, we are already having a trance revival only four or five years on. Stop trying to impose systems thinking on all this.

I think that's down to super-retroism on the part of ILM. It's ten years since 1996 and so the ten-year anniversary of albums like If You're Feeling Sinister are being drawn attention to. If you read the 1996 thread there are just as many people hating on it as they are loving it. The rest of the world is not ready to start getting misty-eyed about the post-Britpop heyday as it's too recent in the minds of those who were there at the time and those who weren't there are too busy discovering their own music to take much notice. In another ten years time the mid nineties'll be really fashionable again and everyone'll want to look like Alex James.

i am buying my gatecrasher kid redux outfit today.

i think of RAZORLIGHT as a britpop revival band innit.

is electro big?

i have been wondering this elsewhere. rihanna convinced me maybe it is.

xpost

Electro
Electroclash
Electronic Synth-Pop
ElectroHouse???

Enrique, I think you discredit the kind of impact Electroclash did have, although you're right about it being a part of the 80s revival which is what I've also been saying. While Electroclash was only seen as a significant movement among the dance cogniscienti (and even they saw it as a fad before it had even begun), I think it had a much bigger impact on the mainstream in the long run.

Getting back to the Radiohead subject, I don't think a track like Idioteque would have been realised without an electro revival. Elsewhere you can compare the sound of the Spice Girls with Girls Aloud and the latter have a distinct electro flavour as opposed to the comparably polished sound of the Spice Girls.

A revival in the Electro sound is just reinforcing the trend that things happening roughly 20-25 years ago tend to get romanticised and revived in a mainstream way whereas stuff that came out 10-15 years ago is seen as embarassing and untrendy. This is not really news, it's just typical of what happens. The 90s were all about the 60s (Oasis, Britpop in general) and 70s; the 80s were all about the 50's (Shakin Stevens, The Stray Cats) and 60's (The Specials, The Jam)

I don't think a track like Idioteque would have been realised without an electro revival.

Despite pre-dating electroclash by a year or two? What nonsense.

I don't think a track like Idioteque would have been realised without an electro revival.

Despite pre-dating electroclash by a year or two and sounding sonically completely different? What nonsense.

fandango, they're all the same thing really aren't they? just from different years. Like all styles of dance music, Electro has had to evolve over time. It's like saying "When people say 'I like House' I don't know what they mean".

What year was Kid A? 2001? Two Lone Swordsmen's "Tiny Reminders" from 2000 was a keystone in the Electro revival and it turned a lot of people onto that sound, especially Warp fans of the time, like Thom Yorke and myself. Before that album I didn't really know what Electro was supposed to be. Idioteque is more than a passing nod to that album.

what's more 'radical' though, doing no singles ('kid a') or releaseing 'pyramid song' as a single ('amnesiac')?

Jedi Knights 'New School Science' >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 'Tiny Reminders', and guess the year it came out

fucks sake...

if you were an ignorant moron listening to shitty music all the time, yes

i think they made this more likely! 'kid a' was a Big Event not just because of the media and public but because it was released without singles and with these weird eco-shows (iirc) instead of a regular tour. that looked far more arrogant, in its way, than doing a patchy double-LP.

doglatin on this thread is like some kind of armando ianucci bot spouting out ridiculous ill thought out opinons with no link to reality.

Electroclash was spawned and then Girls Aloud and stuff etc.

LOLOLOLOLOLOL

maybe fandango you're right but i don't think Radiohead ever wanted to shoot themselves in the foot. In a way by releasing two albums they made their experiments easier to swallow for the Mondeo-generation whereas I think a double-album in the style of say The White Album full of dibs and dabs and experiments and a reprise of one of the main tracks appearing on each side would have kept their integrity without alienating their fanbase.