Screamadelica vs Kid A

This comparison is like a novel that just reads better if you don't know how the story ends. I'm voting for Screamadelica because, quite frankly, they just sounded like they were ~having a better time~.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFuE-thYZ1A

It's not really a fair comparison, asking, do you prefer hedonistic ecstasy or millennial paranoia. I suppose it's asking to decide between being 20 and being 30.

I'd rather be 30. But I'd rather listen to the party sounds of being 20.

At the time I liked Screamadelica more, but I haven't listened to it for a decade and nor would I want to. Whereas I'll still play Kid A a couple of times a year, maybe.

surely XTRMNTR or however you spell it would be a more fitting vs. for kid a?

How do I spoil my ballot paper?

I respect these albums more than I enjoy them. Screamadelica was a bit before my time (although I was aware of Loaded even at age 10 when it came out). I'd been on board with Radiohead for a good while when Kid A came out, but felt like it was merely trying to mix existing IDM with Yorke's vocals and never really assimilating the two very well. I don't think they truly managed to achieve a proper hybrid until In Rainbows to be honest. Cheesecake's right - Screamadelica not only sounds like the band are having a better time (the mixture seems more passionate, more spirited, less toiled over and clinical - the fact the scream were on the right drugs at the time helps). Then again there are whole chunks on Screamadelica that plod by, the third quarter is a huge stretch for me and I generally get bored by that point whereas Kid A is more consistent in quality.

kid a vs xtrmntr was our middle school version of stravinsky/schoenberg

i think i preferred xtrmntr and still do, tho i regard kid a v highly

Both of these are wildly inconsistent, overrated and intermittently great, Screamadelica really doesn't need such an extended comedown section and Kid A sags massively in the middle. But Screamadelica is more enjoyable.

"Don't Fight It, Feel It" is better than anything on Kid A, but overall Kid A takes it.

Dog Latin, sometimes I read your posts and wonder what you're smoking. In Rainbows was the album where RH stopped mucking about with IDM electronics and went back to writing guitar based rawk songs again. How does that make for an effective synthesis?

Screamadelica > Kid A for me - though I rarely listen to either these days.

"I'd rather be 30. But I'd rather listen to the party sounds of being 20."
WCC OTM.
Although now that I'm 40, 30 sounds like 20.

XTRMNTR > both

I think "Kid A" is already aging better. At least, whenever I hear bits of it anywhere - before a show, say, over the PA - it still sounds intriguing to me. "Screamadelica," the idea of it has aged very well, but I never hear it or play it, really. It's part of a bigger scene picture, whereas at the time at least "Kid A" was sort of its own thing.

I will say that I know I saw PS on the "XTRMNTR" tour, with Kevin Shields hovering about, and the vague memory is still swimming in my subconscious almost like a scary nightmare.

Well, the main reason I was comparing Screamadelica to Kid A rather than XTRMNTR was because those were the albums that happened at the same point in the bands' relative careers, rather than at the same point in time. Both of them were the point where a band who were known and had achieved reasonable success for being a guitar-based rock band suddenly made an unexpected turn and made an EDM-influenced album. And then had even greater success with that than they had with the guitar-based rock.

Other parallels are quite funny - the fact that Bobbie G was so little involved in Screamadelica is what made it so much better than the two albums that bookended it. While the lesser involvement of Thom Yorke's voice in Kid A makes it (to my ears) worse than the albums that came after it.

I do agree that both albums are actually overrated in terms of how just how canonised they've become. Though I actually think that Screamadelica bears its overrating better, that it does actually almost stand up to its reputation. While Kid A's reputation has pretty much almost swamped it. But that might be because Primal Scream's star has risen and definitely fallen irretrievably, so Screamadelica looks so much better by comparison, while the canonisation of Radiohead is still an active process. That I'm surprised Screamadelica is as good as it is, while Kid A couldn't possibly ever live up to the hype that is still being wrapped around it.

I just have better memories to Screamadelica. It's one of those albums that I hear, and it makes me think of so many experiences of dropping a tab and dancing till dawn. I couldn't imagine dropping a tab to Kid A, that would just be the worst trip ever. It's just that Screamadelica is such a drugs, clubbing, parties, good times kind of album, it's a rock album that manages to capture the feeling of going out dancing (even the saggy dub symphony bit is the bit of the evening where you wander off and have urgent emotional bonding in the ladies' room) while I just would not want to go to the club that Kid A got its vibe off. Kid A is a sitting in your room listening to it on headphones album, which is good and necessary, and I like headphones albums, but it misses the point of dance music, and almost seems to have a kind of contempt for clubbing as an activity, even as it's adopting the sounds and signifiers of "dance" music.

(I have just realised that I think Screamadelica is great start to finish because I never, ever, ever listen to Damaged all the way through. I just skip it the moment it even starts to play.)

I'm also going to commit absolute blasphemy now, but I saw both PRML SCRM and Radiohead several times around the XTRMNTR/Kid A period.

And Primal Scream, during the Kevin Shields/Mani era, when they hit a really good night, were actually the better live band. But that could have been because I was seeing them in smaller venues. It's easier to lift the roof off a secret gig at the Mean Fiddler than a gigantor tent in Victoria Park.

I mean, Kevin Shields vs Jonny Greenwood, no competition. Come on.

I probably feel the same way about Andrew Weatherall vs Nigel Godrich to be honest.

You will also note the one comparison I am resisting making.

Okay just listened to 'Screamadelica' for the first time in a decade. 'Don't Fight It, Feel It' is v good. The rest? Nah, not for me.

Damn!

tuff q.

will get back to you(se)

Screamadelica in a heartbeat. To me it stands for that whole era where the most of-the-moment electronic music was vivid, extrovert, communal, on intimate terms with pop. It makes me think of St Etienne, Happy Mondays, MBV (all of whom were remixed by Weatherall). Kid A is austere, isolated, strained, aloof, and makes me think of nothing but itself. Raves >>>>>> bedrooms. Also, their career arcs matter - only XTRMNTR rivals or exceeds Screamadelica, whereas Kid A is at best my fifth favourite Radiohead album.

And this is OTM:

Other parallels are quite funny - the fact that Bobbie G was so little involved in Screamadelica is what made it so much better than the two albums that bookended it. While the lesser involvement of Thom Yorke's voice in Kid A makes it (to my ears) worse than the albums that came after it.

kid a easy.

WCC otm about the obvious difference in vibe between the two ("a rock album that manages to capture the feeling of going out dancing" vs. "a sitting in your room listening to it on headphones album"). screamadelica's infectious energy and enthusiasm don't necessarily trump kid a's creepy, hermetic disassociation, though. these are just two different approaches, both valid, and i find the latter much more successful and interesting, overall. even in its moment, primal scream's rave rock euphoria came across as a bit cloying to me. and i just hate xtrmntr.

DL powerfully OTM.

So consensus is Kid A has aged better but Screamadelica is more fun?

My problem with Screamadelica is the gospel choirs it has going on in some songs like Movin on Up and Come Together. I'm very picky with the use of choirs. Anything rock that sounds like going to church puts me off.

personally: XTRMNTR >>>> kid a >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> screamadelica

Then again, it is called Screamadelica.

Screamadelica easy. Never have warmed to Kid A.

But Screamadelica came out when I was 19. It was the right thing at the right time. And it still conjures memories of those heady days, which is all the reliving of them I care to ever do.

Kid A is a sitting in your room listening to it on headphones album, which is good and necessary, and I like headphones albums, but it misses the point of dance music, and almost seems to have a kind of contempt for clubbing as an activity, even as it's adopting the sounds and signifiers of "dance" music.

― They have fangs, They have teeth! (White Chocolate Cheesecake)

something off about this. agree that kid a is a loner/introvert headphones album, but i don't think it "misses the point of dance music". it simply has different aims. and i really don't understand the sense in which it might be said to have "contempt for clubbing as an activity".

my world of ravers

Not that I'm particularly in the mood to stan for Kid A but the "oh it's just this lazy swiping of ideas from IDM" line that people trot out constantly really shits me to tears. It always feels like the person saying it imagines themselves as standing in a pulpit addressing a congregation unaware that Autechre or Aphex Twin or Oval exist.

Also contenderizer is correct, by 2000 1970 non-dancing electronic music was well entrenched enough that you could be influenced by it without necessarily adopting any stance at all vis a vis clubbing.

i am not qualified to talk about this particular discussion (i've never heard screamadelica) but i'm just going to throw this in for, hopefully, tim f to pick up: when kid a came out and got its rapturous plaudits, at the time what made me gnash my teeth was that to my ears tori amos's to venus and back had done the alt-musician-goes-electronic thing with so much more life and invention and ideas.

I mentally replaced To Venus and Back with From the Choirgirl Hotel and decided not to call you out on it because that's a pretty good album and stuff even if I disagree with you totally. And then I noticed that it in fact said To Venus and Back and I just stared at what you said in shock for like 4 minutes.

I don't think their approaches to electronic music are particular similar.

I couldn't even say what electronic music Tori was listening to in order to come up with her arrangements, which is one of those actually-neutral-in-itself facts that can be framed as a positive or negative depending on yr aim - either she "got electronic music wrong" or she "got electronic music wrong in a way that was right, or at least more interesting."

Whereas Radiohead offered a very competent, very thoughtful integration of contemporary electronic music mores. So it's either more competent or more predictable, depending on how you frame it. The problem I have with "oh it's just IDM DO YOU SEE" stance is not that it's wrong but that it's just an obvious criticism, it's really only one step away from "OH BUT IT HAS GUITARS." As music listeners (and occasionally music crit writers) we are better than this, or should be.

My experience of the reception to Kid A was that it was rather negative, Brett D at pitchfork aside. There's been a lot of retrospective upgrading of its rep.

I remember a guy at the cinema where I worked smugly announcing to me at the beginning of 2001 that the next Radiohead album would be a return to the sound of OK Computer and was the album that they'd meant to release all along and Kid A would be wiped from popular consciousness.

Would have loved to watch his face the first time he listened to Amnesiac.

Haha I did the same thing as Melissa initially. I obv. like To Venus and Back but I don't think it moves beyond From The Choirgirl Hotel arrangements-wise.

FTR "Higher Than The Sun" is the best thing on either album and more than anything else suggests an awesome parallel universe where The Orb produced a raft of dance-pop crossover tunes.

(either album being Kid A and Screamadelica)

i think FTCH has better songs but TVAB is way more invested in electronic production, which is why i used that example

One thing that I think would be interesting to talk about is the waves of electronic music influence that lapped over the (for want of a better word) alternative music world throughout the nineties and early 00s, like ripples in a pond.

For instance I tend to think that Tori was part of more of a mid-nineties moment of musicians reacting to trip hop and even taking their cues from U2 - sorry Lex! but in truth both those Tori albums sound like her imagining working with Flood (maybe to make it more palatable sub in "A Perfect Day Elise" where I refer to U2).

Radiohead were obv drawing on a different sonic palette and if there's a female musician that beat them to that particular punch it's Bjork with Homogenic - as you'd expect.

Also I wonder if Tori had listened to Ruby's Salt Peter. OMG Lex did you ever hear that album?

Oh I just checked the relevant thread and you very much did. Of course!

yeah Is This Desire? and Salt Peter both sounded way more innovative and strange than Kid A, too - Salt Peter and TVAB have been almost totally written out of history though

I couldn't even say what electronic music Tori was listening to in order to come up with her arrangements, which is one of those actually-neutral-in-itself facts that can be framed as a positive or negative depending on yr aim - either she "got electronic music wrong" or she "got electronic music wrong in a way that was right, or at least more interesting."

me neither! apart from obviously BT and Armand Van H?

literally unbelievable that apparently no one actually asked her this at the time.

xpost Historical developments very much in character.

Actually a sonically and historically plausible explanation is The Downward Spiral?

My sense from the time is that anyone who tried to do use looped drums and electronic textures was boxed by the media as ripping from Portishead and Tricky regardless of whether they sounded even remotely similar..

Again, same thing as saying Kid A is "just" a rock band ripping ideas from IDM.

It's an unfortunate feature of rock crit that rock band influences are allowed in all their subtlety and nuance and infinitesimal degrees of individuation but any attempt to incorporate electronic music sees everyone leaping for the laziest analogies possible.

But then I guess this is expressive of that general truth of music reception, that the less familiar you are with a particular style then the more examples of it will appear alike to the point of redundancy.

Oh god, so many x-posts which I won't read but this was in response to Tim F's first 2 posts.

Firstly, thank you very much but I'm very well aware of the history of non-dancing electronic music. But my opinions have also been formed by reading a lot of interviews with Thom Yorke and his own particular history with music, and dance music in particular (stuff like, he was a DJ while at college, and he used to incessantly play "house records" to the great annoyance of his housemates/future bandmates while they were trying to listen to Pale Saints. Another interview where Jonny was taking the piss out of Thom and saying "Thom basically wants to be Madonna" and Thom not understanding why this might even be considered to be an insult, because he would actually love to be Madonna) There has been a tension, within Radiohead, between Thom's love of club music and other members of the band (and a large segment of their fanbase!) who do have a contempt towards dance music, and would have preferred that they remain a more traditional rock group - or would prefer to be the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in Jonny's case. That's part of what makes them interesting, to me, the ways that they tried to resolve this tension before they just went off in the end and diverted those conflicting impulses to solo work/collaborations.

It's ironic, because the dialogue over that "standing in a pulpit" argument was exactly what triggered my bout of trolling.

It's always kind of a shock going on a Radiohead forum, because I'm used to discussing music in an atmosphere like ILM, where most people have a pretty good comprehensive knowledge of the history of music, even if they have prejudices or just concentrate on their own particular branch of expertise. This is a group of music obsessives. And when someone tries the "it's lazy swiping ideas from IDM' argument here, they will get called on it, as I have been doing since late 2000.

But a forum for a band like Radiohead will contain a core group of music obsessives with an ILM-like musical library, and also contain a huge number of, well... I get called a snob if I refer to them as "12 CD people" but people for whom Radiohead really are the *most* out-there band they know. When you have a band that are that popular, you will get a large proportion of fans who are not music obsessives. It happens. Which is fine, people like what they like. But there *are* some people in that group of people who have, literally, never heard an Autechre record, and insist that Radiohead are somehow groundbreaking or experimental or even avant-garde. This is not straw-manning, these people exist and one of those threads happens like clockwork every few months.

And I would hate to take that pulpit-y attitude because bands like Radiohead are doing something different and equally valid - they are popularisers of ideas, rather than innovators. I think it's actually much harder to take ideas *from* the cutting edge and get them to have the kind of mass popular appeal and exposure that RH have. But they didn't invent those ideas, and the claim that they did (as people do) is just ludicrous.

I get really wound up by the idea of "innovation" obsession. I basically stopped reading the Aphex Twin vs Autechre thread because of that obsession with "innovation" and newness, I find it just perplexing and totally alien. Yes, I recognise that being overly derivative in music is a bad thing, but it doesn't seem like the solution is that constant churning search for "newness" - that race to be "FIRST!" Because that innovation obsession is just treating music like a race, and whoever happens to be the first to stumble into a new technique or piece of technology is often random, and the person who does it first is not always going to be the first. That the artist who refines or popularises or mutates the innovative idea has as much to contribute as the very first person that discovers what happens if you flick that particular switch.

So all these kinds of jumbled thoughts were what triggered the question, and it's quite irritating, Tim, to feel like you're putting words in my mouth stating the exact opposite of the line of thought that got me to asking the question.

n.b. that Ruby album was amazing and I was just listening to Tiny Meat yesterday!

I picked Primal Scream to rile Radiohead fans because they've been going long enough for 12-CD people to be aware of them, and their current reputation for awfulness.

But the conversation about overlapping waves of embarrassing indie-rock / club music crossover could go back further, to Jesus Jones and EMF but I don't think that anyone there would have heard of them to wince over.

Or further still to New Order, who did probably actually invent the whole thing, but the argument of "rock band suddenly switches to club music" would only work if you included Joy Division as part of New Order, because New Order pretty much seem to have been conceived from inception to ~include a dance element~.

I mean, the whole "there's always been a dance element to our music" joke of ageing dinosaur bands who suddenly got a remix and a makeover, when did that cliche date to?

Also, Lex, you will HATE Screamadelica, and Primal Scream will just make you gnash your teeth in general, but I do urge you to go to the top of this thread and listen to Don't Fight It Feel It, which I posted at the beginning of the thread, to get an idea of exactly how much of a deviation Screamadelica was from what was ~expected~ of a regulation Creation Revival-Rock band.

I was agreeing with you against Dog Latin re Radiohead's use of IDM.

But whatever members of the band may have personally thought, I can't listen to Kid A and think "hmm, this smacks of contempt of club culture", and I'm curious as to what musical cues you think suggest that.

Clearly there's a tension between operating as a traditional band and not, but to me it doesn't feel like club culture is at one end of that tension. Definitely more like a modern equiv of a mid to late 70s Eno record (which, similarly, had nothing to say one way or another about disco culture).

Radiohead-fans having contempt of club-culture is a different matter and I'm sure everything you say in that regard is correct.

Oh, OK, I thought that was to me and got defensive. Fair enough.

I think it's being aware that members of Radiohead themselves had contempt for club culture - and listening to Idioteque with that filter in mind. I mean, even calling the song Idioteque seems to drip with a kind of snide contempt, though Yorke's contempt is often so scattershot it's hard to tell where it's aimed at. I am probably interpreting it completely wrongly, but that song, the contrast between the music and the lyrics just seems to have this undercurrent of "how can you fuckwits be dancing round your mobiles when the polar caps are melting."

(Basically, the best way for me to actually enjoy RH is to not listen to or attempt to understand the lyrics at all, because I always get them wrong.)

Ha ha, googling "there's always been a dance element to our music" the first result is Freaky Trigger and the second is an ILX thread. It was the Soup Dragons. (Ironically on the Screamadelica poll.)

I think if I read about Radiohead (and particularly "Idioteque") I'd agree with that line.

Yorke seemed so full of contempt for everything in that era that I suspect that the more club-like the album sounded the more it would have seemed contemptuous of that culture.

Yeah, it was probably a mistake to interpret it as contemptuous as contemptuous of club culture when the record is much more contempt of everything-culture.

Got another hit on "there's always been a dance element to..." linking to discussion of U2's Zooropa. Everything on ILX is circular.

Idioteque to me always (musically) reads more to me like deliberate electronic primitivism. More Silver Apples than IDM. I suspect the title is just one of Thom's random neologisms rather than any particular criticism/commentary on any form of music. Or perhaps it's even more self-deprecating than critical. x-post

With that drumbeat? No, it's Jonny wanting to be Silver Apples with Thom wanting a BANGERZ drumbeat over the top. I guess that's what I always forget about Thom, that as contemptuous as he is, he always includes himself in his contempt, that many, many times, what reads as arrogance is actually extreme self depreciation twisted around.

Trying to figure out where The Shamen fit in all this.

But that beat is all Jonny. It was all based on a drum machine that he built from scratch.

Or perhaps it's even more self-deprecating than critical.

this is how I read it as well. A kind of preemptive self-dismissal before anyone accused them of failing to make a danceable tune.

...there *are* some people in that group of people who have, literally, never heard an Autechre record, and insist that Radiohead are somehow groundbreaking or experimental or even avant-garde. This is not straw-manning, these people exist and one of those threads happens like clockwork every few months.

And I would hate to take that pulpit-y attitude because bands like Radiohead are doing something different and equally valid - they are popularisers of ideas, rather than innovators. I think it's actually much harder to take ideas *from* the cutting edge and get them to have the kind of mass popular appeal and exposure that RH have. But they didn't invent those ideas, and the claim that they did (as people do) is just ludicrous.

― They have fangs, They have teeth! (White Chocolate Cheesecake), Sunday, May 13, 2012 1:29 AM (23 minutes ago)

i have problems with the "innovators" vs "popularizers" construction here. synthesis can be innovative, can be avant-garde. i'm sure that autechre were influenced by other artists just as radiohead were influenced in turn. i credit radiohead not for inventing their music out of whole cloth, but for the ways in which they used their influences to express their own ideas - ideas that would go on in turn to influence others. that strikes me as sufficiently innovative to earn the descriptor.

That surprises me, Melissa. But Silver Apples didn't use that kind of drumbeat at all, they had a live drummer who played very busy, shuffly jazz influenced stuff, which it what I'd expect from Jonny. It's not even an early electronica kind of drumbeat, and TBF it's the distortion on it that reminds me of early Classics-era Aphex Twin specifically.

I just want Lex to come back and listen to Don't Fight It Feel It. And watch the perplexed struggle across his face. I'm really curious as to what he would make of it.

I didn't say that the Silver Apples used that kind of drumbeat? It's just that between the Paul Lansky sample and building a primitive drum machine from scratch out of white noise, I think what they were going for there was considerably older than people seem to think. People comparing Idioteque to IDM always seem way off the mark to me. And obviously it is dance music influenced, but not I think in such a way where it's coming from anywhere but their attempt to make a paranoid dance-y track out of analogue elements.

xxpost trying to find the ground zero of these sounds is basically trying to follow an infinitely receding horizon.

I'm just making stuff up now but arguably it's tempting to over-credit 90s IDM acts like Aphex Twin and Autechre because their general sound-design (as opposed to - or at least as distinct from and in addition to - actual ideas) proved so influential in a more general "sound of now" sense.

Cont, that's right back to the beginning of this thread. Someone was trying to argue that Radiohead were "innovators" because they mixed krautrock with club music, and that that was somehow such an original synthesis that it qualified them as innovators. And my argument was that Primal Scream were singing Can lyrics over the top of club music as far back as Screamadelica, so that particular synthesis was just not indicative of ~innovation~ at all.

Innovation is not the same thing as quality. Not being particularly innovative does not make something *bad*. It's only this worship of novelty and "race to FIRST!" obsession that makes people think that innovation is so inherently good, that if something is good, it must therefore be innovative. And it's just not the case.

Though I would certainly argue that finding a new/different angle on a pre-existing synthesis can be innovative in and of itself, though I'm not sure I'd ever even argue that Radiohead's innovation (whether or not it exists) hinges on synthesis of krautrock and club music specifically (in fact, I definitely wouldn't).

i guess my point is that innovation doesn't have to be so a+b obvious as "they mixed krautrock with club music". i think radiohead's notable innovation was the way that they mixed a great many things together (including but not limited to krautrock and club music) in order to articulate a musical, philosophical and aesthetic "vision" that was distinctly their own, perfectly suited to its moment, and hugely influential. tim is right, though, that bjork had paved the way with homogenic.

I would argue that Radiohead are hugely innovative - when it comes to marketing strategies, packaging, presentation, promotion, how they present themselves. I'm not being facetious at all, I think they're absolutely brilliant at that, through their hatred/distrust of traditional media, they raised different forms of promotion, especially through technology, and interaction with their fans to a kind of artwork. Which is really innovative and creative.

But I do genuinely believe that anyone who thinks that their *music* is actually innovative just hasn't had a very wide exposure to enough music, whether that's Aphex Twin *or* the obscure early electronic composers that Jonny likes to namedrop in the same way that he likes to pretend he's never been influenced by Pink Floyd, oh no, not at all, ever.

But I think that's an incredibly narrow definition of music innovation, then? I mean, for better or worse, I think what I would give Radiohead the most credit for is hitching all of those influences both structurally and sonically to plain old pretty songs in a way that actually worked.

I suppose the broader problem is the attempt to locate definitive firsts.

I'm sure someone will come up with some evidence to make me look like a hypocrite but I don't really think of music in these terms anymore.

If an artist's aesthetic is worth grasping then it's worth grasping in its totality as opposed to the sum aggregate of influences.

(the above directed at the hypothetical fans WCC talks about rather than people ITT)

eh, i've listened to a lot of aphex twin, early electronic composers and pink floyd. kid a still strikes me as one of the most successfully and satisfyingly "innovative" big rock albums of the last quarter century, with little competition. i suppose framing it as rock is a cheat in certain respects, but i don't think they ever fully escaped that context.

this all seems like eye of the beholder stuff, tbh

I mean, obviously Radiohead have a lot of fans who think they invented music in general. Their fanbase is enormous, so obviously there are a ton of 12-cd types and a ton of actual teenagers who have yet to be exposed to much music. But I don't think that that means you have to take what they say and run in the total opposite direction, either. Or feel like you have to apologize for being a fan of Radiohead because some of their fans aren't particularly musically knowledgeable and might make ridiculous claims about them. They also have a ton of fans who have a deep knowledge of music who still think that Radiohead put a new or interesting spin on things. I don't think claiming that nothing they have done is remotely innovative is particularly perceptive either, and it just reads as apologism or shame at being a Radiohead fan to me.

Oh quite a lot of discussion since my earlier post. WCC - I don't hear In Rainbows as a rawk album per se; I mean 15 Step is still very much electronic and only Bodysnatchers feels like a return to rock traditionalism. The rest is ambient mixed with songwriting, but assimilated well whereas Kid A sounds like a clunky experiment at times.

The only thing this thread is telling me is that I really ought to give XTRMNTR a better chance. Always thought Vanishing Point was their true masterpiece.

Also this whole 'calling out Radiohead for ripping off IDM is bad and wrong' thing - well I can see how it's an argument that's been driven into the ground, but Kid A really IS MAJORLY influenced by Autechre et al. There's no denying it. In retrospect though, there is a lot more going on in there than mere warpmania as I'd originally thought back when I first heard it. It's easier to recognise this nowadays because Warp and the IDM sound is generally less pervasive whereas back in 2001, Aphex was releasing 'Druqks', Autechre 'Confield', Plaid 'Double Figure' etc, so Radiohead, this big rock band, coming in and saying 'look at us, we can do this too' (and arguably doing it worse) felt like tokenism at the time. In that way it's aged considerably better for me, now I cAn stand back and appreciate it for more than the sum of its parts.

I think it's a mistake to equate stated influence with being an attempt to actually BE that thing. Autechre certainly influenced their direction but I hardly think that's equivalent to them trying to transliterate LP5 into being a rock record and somehow failing or somehow only creating a weak copy or only pasting the influence on.

There's little of Kid A that actually reminds me of the IDM that people often compare it to. It's an ingredient, but far from the only one. I think people took Radiohead speaking openly about their influences as a convenient opportunity to tear down the album by comparing it unfavorably to music it honestly sounded very little like. Songs like "The National Anthem," "How to Disappear Completely," "Morning Bell," & "In Limbo" are emblematic of the record's sound, but obviously couldn't be remotely compared to AFX or Autechre.

Agree with this. There's more to it than that yes. Although when I walked into the record shop that October morning and heard the track 'Kid A' playing over the tannoy (it being my first impression of their hailed new direction), my immediate reaction was one of suspicion, and it took a good while to shake it off. As I say, it wasn't until I dug it out again many years later that I was able to appreciate it outside of that zeitgeisty context.

I think what I would give Radiohead the most credit for is hitching all of those influences both structurally and sonically to plain old pretty songs in a way that actually worked.

I would completely agree with this. It's the fundamental basis for creating good quality music.

But that is not "innovation" in any understanding of the word.

And if it *does* count as innovation, then, quite frankly, Primal Scream qualify as just as innovative as Radiohead, and that's just crazy talk.

...

...

But I'm kind of curious as to why Radiohead continue to get so much credit for "innovation" when anyone who suggested that Primal Scream were innovative would get laughed out of the room. Is it because of the wider audience, that the majority of people who listen to Primal Scream are already familiar with Can and club music and free jazz? I don't think that Radiohead hide their thefts better - Thom pretty much admits flat out that when he's stuck for a melody he goes to REM or U2 - is it that the things they nick are more or less cool or naff (depending on who you ask)? Thom Yorke spouts easily as dodgy political views as Bobbie Gillespie, but Bobby gets called on it, while Thom gets made a spokesman? I guess with Primal Scream it's the drugs and the steady run of terrible albums. While Radiohead avoided drugs like the nice middle class boys they were, and had the middle-management-shake-hands-and-unit-shift approach to cracking the States?

I know it's kind of random to "compare and contrast" the careers of any two bands or two albums in that way, but it's just this sense that these two albums did similar things, yet one band ended up canonised and the other ended up a laughing stock - even thought the laughing stock's album, to my prejudiced ears, is the better album. But I guess that's it. Primal Scream's reputation almost entirely hangs on Screamadelica, while Radiohead have not put out a dodgy album since their debut.

I dunno. I don't feel like I'm being apologetic. It's just that sometimes loving a band means accepting their limitations and not over-romanticising them.

Radiohead have never u-turned on their chosen style/aesthetic the way Primal Scream did throughout the nineties (and, as far as I'm aware, thereafter, though I haven't actually heard the subsequent albums). Rightly or wrongly that gets held against PS.

Rock crit tends to consider innovation and fashion as very separate and, typically, diametrically opposed - that is, it's impossible to be innovative by being fashionable. If something is innovative that is also fashionable, then it is because the fashion coalesced around it.

Of course this is nonsense: fashion and "innovation" (however you choose to define it) are in dialogue with one another, and as much innovation is produced by following the dictates of fashion as is produced by striking out on your own or swimming against the tide.

I think you and I have very different ideas of innovation then, because frankly I don't think it's even in short supply. I would happily call Primal Scream innovative, I just don't like their innovations. x-post

I don't think it would be laughable to suggest Screamadelica was innovative. Sure there were tracks that had sounded like its tracks before, but as a complete package, released by an indie rock band and having mainstream success - I can't think of another example prior to its release.

I guess also I should have raised the issue of innovation as perceived marker of quality on the Autechre vs Aphex Twin thread, when several people were saying that they preferred Autechre to Aphex Twin ~because they were more innovative~ or words to that effect. (I'm paraphrasing, which I shouldn't do on ILM, because my memory is poor.)

I do think that there has been so much Autechre discussion on ILM recently that Autechre *would* will a poll against a kitten picture at the moment, while we're (read: I) am mostly talked out about Aphex Twin, that I have done my revisiting and have nothing left to say about him until he releases another album.

But it's that idea of "innovation" as marker of quality, rather than accepting that something can be good without being particularly innovative, and still be incredibly good. Maybe this is a straw man, but I just seem to forever be encountering that argument, especially on IDM threads, and it's just perplexing to me.

I dunno, I guess I need to think about this dialogue of innovation and fashion. I don't think that innovation comes from striking against fashion *or* from following fashion. Innovation, genuine innovation, is something that occurs when a new element enters the picture - like I said, new technology or new techniques. Or that kind of weird quantum leap. It's kind of distinct, to me, from the process of synthesis, refinement, reaction against but which most musical genres form, splinter, regroup. Therefore I think of innovation as something genuinely rare.

x-post I guess that's it. That it's not laughable to think of Screamadelica as "innovative" but it is laughable to think of Primal Scream that way.

While, with Radiohead, it feels like it's almost the opposite. Like, when it comes down to it, there isn't a single Radiohead album that I can point to and say "that's genuinely innovative" in the way I can with Screamadelica, but they still somehow have this ~reputation~ for being somehow "innovative"?

(Yes, it's Rockist to speak of albums, but these are the most Rockist of Rock bands we are discussing.)

I find your stance a bit weird in the sense that you argue that innovation isn't important but at the same time it's fairly clearly an important issue to you?

it's a recovering catholic kind of thing maybe?

Well, the main reason I was comparing Screamadelica to Kid A rather than XTRMNTR was because those were the albums that happened at the same point in the bands' relative careers

I've never actually thought about it like this. To me, Screamadelica is Primal Scream's OK Computer - bolt from the blue, instantly canonized album. If I had to compare Kid A to any one Scream album, in terms of the bands' career arc, it would be Give Out But Don't Give Up, which is pretty much the polar opposite of Kid A in terms of musical intention but they share something in common, namely following up the hugely successful career-defining album with a record whose critical reception was more along the lines of "why have they done this?" The idea that both bands were sullying their legacy by doing the opposite of what critics wanted at the time.

And yes, as mentioned upthread the contemporary critical reception of Kid A was lukewarm at best although it's worth remembering that UK musical criticism was on the verge of a hugely reactionary period that Kid A just didn't fit into. It fits much better if you look at it in the context of current music - I don't think anyone anticipated how integrated into the dance music 'conversation' Radiohead would become, albeit the FACT Magazine Big Serious Face end of dance music. When Thom Yorke DJs he's usually playing people like Martyn and Untold, you'll routinely hear Eraser-era Thom songs cropping up on commercial mix albums by Ellen Allien or whoever, the last Apparat album was basically his attempt to make a Radiohead album. There's an exchange of musical ideas going on that feels current, whereas the whole Warp/IDM thing was pretty much played out by the time Kid A came out (and I don't even think Kid A sounds like Warp, particularly). I wasn't in a position to be paying any attention in 1991 but Screamdelica retrospectively feels much more of a piece with what was going on at the time than Kid A, but maybe that's because it's Weatherall's album really, not Primal Scream's.

Also, Kid A should have come as a surprise to absolutely no one in 2000, there is an absolute shit-ton of electronic music DNA in OK Computer, and even Big Rock era Radiohead had a better appreciation of rhythm than they're usually given credit for.

And Primal Scream, during the Kevin Shields/Mani era, when they hit a really good night, were actually the better live band

They were an exceptionally good live band around that time. I remember them doing evil, evil things to Kowalski which involved huge amounts of bass and guitar noise and enormous thudding drums. I've seen them at festivals intermittently since and they haven't come close to that, although any rock band's sound would suffer from suddenly removing Kevin Shields from the equation.

xposts - Screamdelica certainly feels innovative from within the context of rock music, but then so does Kid A. Viewing either from an electronic or dance music context doesn't strike me as being a particularly fruitful approach.

Also, Kid A should have come as a surprise to absolutely no one in 2000, there is an absolute shit-ton of electronic music DNA in OK Computer, and even Big Rock era Radiohead had a better appreciation of rhythm than they're usually given credit for.

Agreed.

xpost I dunno, I think Screamadelica is a useful album from a dance music perspective. Even dance fans occasionally want the big celebratory narrativistic ties-everything-together album qua album.

Which may also be part of why so many people (including but, crucially, not limited to rock fans) overrate The Chemical Bros' Surrender vis a vis the other of the duo's first 4 albums.

Radiohead were also an exceptionally good live band around 2000 though. One of the reasons I've never really liked Kid A that much is that a lot of it feels half-finished, most of those songs sounded much better and more developed and in some cases completely different when they played them live.

I had never thought anyone overrated Surrender particularly. Hey Boy, Hey Girl yes, but not the album as a whole, although it is very consciously reaching for Screamadelica territory without getting there (the same is true for most of the subsequent Chems albums).

Oh it seems everyone I've ever met IRL thought Surrender their best album by a mile.

And it seemed everyone at my school who took music seriously pronounced it the album of 1999.

x-posts it's not that innovation is important to me, I'm just perplexed and trying to puzzle through why it's something that others use as such a marker of quality that it would render Autechre as somehow better than Aphex Twin! Ha ha. I get stuck on words, concepts, and like to work through them at length. It doesn't make them important to me. It just means that right now, I want to talk about this until I understand what it means. Maybe that makes me semi-autistic or perhaps even psychotic by the qualities of that other thread.

What makes a band "good" is obviously a hugely important question. I just see "innovation" as a weird way of judging merit. And I'm trying to puzzle through why it is or isn't important.

It's like... thinking about the history of science and/or technology and the different ways that "progress" is made. This is constant question, a constant dialogue. Is change and/or "progress" something that happens in slow increments, that kind of bob-and-tack that sailboats use to travel against the tide, go with a fashion, make refinements, then have an about-face and tack back the opposite direction, and when looked at from a distance, this wiggly wavey line looks like it's heading in a single direction. But then there *are* those kind of "great leaps forward" where everything changes overnight, someone does something that literally no one has ever heard or seen before, and it's groundbreaking. And the latter is what I'd call actual innovation. And there's this narrative that this, the "great leap forward" is what is important - in science or in music or anything. As opposed to the slow and steady process of mutation and refinement. Which is not actually innovation in the same way, but the kind of picking up the pieces of the great leap forward - the Cambrian Explosion that follows the initial out-of-nowhere innovation - that is also important. Maybe more important, in terms of making this amazing new mutation actually usable or popular or whatever.

My science metaphor is getting a bit thin now. I'm going to come back to DC's post because while I agree with most of it, but disagree with some of it.

LOL, Surrender was basically where I got off the Chems bus. I remember it as being a huge disappointment compared to the first two, though I've come to like it more on revisiting it.

Also, Kid A should have come as a surprise to absolutely no one in 2000, there is an absolute shit-ton of electronic music DNA in OK Computer, and even Big Rock era Radiohead had a better appreciation of rhythm than they're usually given credit for.

I disagree. Big difference between the trip hop influences on OK Computer and the full-on where'd-Tom-go? abstraction of, say, Kid A's title track. It's not like Radiohead just tricked out some regular songs with nice dance rhythms - they took a new approach to structure, arrangements, everything. I went to the playback and I remember a definite sense of surprise all round. Afterwards people differed on whether they liked it or not but nobody was saying, oh yeah, of course, I saw that coming. Not a total surprise but a significant one.

I suppose what I'm saying is that Kid A brought something to the fore that had been latent in the band for some time that a lot of people had overlooked. The structure of Paranoid Android is all over the place and as distinctive an approach as anything on Kid A, but because it's anchored in guitar-bass-drums it was maybe easier to get a handle on. And there are sonic details on OK Computer, most notably the quartertone strings at the end of Climing Up The Walls, tucked away at in the songs that, on Kid A, they'd feel a lot more comfortable foregrounding.

They were also talking a lot about electronic music from OK Computer onwards. And actually focussing on electronic music is to overlook a lot of the other stuff that's going on in Kid A - jazz, contemporary classical etc. But yes I'd agree that the treatment of all that source material was a surprise, rather than the source material itself necessarily.

I just had a really depressing thought, on DC's comparing Kid A to Give Out... that if Give Out But Don't Give Up had been released in about 2001, it would have been universally acclaimed as the front-runner of the "New Rock Revolution" instead of being rightly laughed at. And I have the uncomfortable feeling that maybe Primal Scream were even more forward thinking in their retrofetishism that I'd given them credit for.

But I think DL touches on something that I've said repeatedly about Kid A - that when people are kind of feeling with this language of calling it "experimental" or "avant-garde" or whatever (things that to me, imply innovation) what they really meant was that it was an incredibly ABSTRACT album.

It was the musical equivalent of a band switching from lugubrious late Victorian oil painting to colour field abstraction. Which makes sense in a context where there was Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and Cubism and Expressionism in between, being done by other artists.

But you know, for all their talk about "oh Airbag was influenced by DJ Shadow" I don't think that stuff really surfaced until after OK Computer. Though maybe that was down to how the album got edited. Kid A makes sense if you'd heard the Airbag EP and things like "Meeting In The Aisle" but they were signposts that only seemed obvious in retrospect because the Airbag EP also had bursts of big rock noise on it, too.

matt otm, this was not that shocking to young fanboy ears, it didnt really represent a qualitatively different sort of leap from the one theyd already taken from the bends to okc. they'd already laid the ground in interviews, aforementioned phil selway talk about dj shadow influence on the airbag drums, thom saying they were frustrated they "weren't musical enough" (or similar) to do subterranean homesick alien how they'd like (jazzy & w/ a rhodes i think), their trajectory was p clear.

this was also post-homogenic

I find it puzzling when people say IDM was 'played out' in 2001. Most of the associated acts hit their critical peaks that year or thereabouts. If anything it was Kid A that created the wilderness period for Warp-style music - once the big rock bands were doing it, what was the point? Soon after, Warp started releasing more and more rock-format stuff. Can't help thinking there was a direct correlation.

Kid A came out in 2000.

I've said this a million times recently, but it still blows my mind that Drukqs came out the year after Kid A. It just shows how perception of time just gets completely warped and turned around by one's own memories and experiences. Because Kid A feels (not sounds, just feels) something quite recent, while Druqks feels like it happened in another era.

I'd have sworn blind that most of Aphex Twin's work came out before I moved back to the UK but the "big hits" as it were happened after.

xpost yeah if anything the fact that so many IDM acts had high profile releases in 2001 would have been assisted by Kid A rather than undermined. But I doubt it had much impact either way. 2001 IDM was really a confluence of all sorts of things (glitch, tigerbeat, microhouse, dub-techno, nu-electro etc.) of which the big Warp acts were really only well-publicised the tip of the iceberg. What happened post 2001 was the entrenchment of that burgeoning generational change.

Warp getting more rock oriented during the 00s was an effect, not a cause: the effect of it not really knowing which way the electronic music currents were going and deciding to diversify its risk instead.

Kompakt did a similar thing in an equivalent point in its lifecycle.

(How did I manage to spell Drukqs 3 different ways in the same post? And I know how that album is spelled, unlike mnay other words.)

*many

Blimey, it was 2000 wasn't it. Bang goes that theory. Must've got mixed up with Amnesiac.

I sometimes think it would be quite interesting to have people put together a "personal music timeline" of when they think "landmark" albums came out - either in relationship to the year, or in relationship to each other. And I wonder if it distorts people's sense of "influence" when they make those kinds of memory mistakes or miswrites.

You're not wrong about Druqks feeling a lot longer ago than Kid A. Mind you, I remember feeling like OK Computer was a 'recent' album several years after it came out.

I've generally got frighteningly accurate recall of when things came out. Drukqs was after Em and I met; Kid A was still at university. Kid A maybe feels more recent because Radiohead have continued their narrative and dialogue in the public sphere, whereas AFX had retreated from view to most people, and thus feels like an artist from another time.

Screamdelica never did anything for me. I have a huge list of classics from this era that never did anything for me, Drukqs included. What else? Spacemen 3, Sonic Youth, Splint...

Kid A kicked off my second year of university, Amnesiac closed it. Druqks started my 3rd year (or at least it must have but I swear I was listening to it before that)...

I'm not going to stick around for this debate cos my knowledge of both RH and PS is pretty minimal, but it seems like the rock band does club music was pretty much innovated by the Beatles "Tomorrow Never Knows".

Kid A and Amnesiac pretty much bookended a horribly abusive relationship, and one of the worst time periods of my life, I think I've just blotted reference points because I either don't want to revisit that time, or else I was drinking so heavily to cope that I can't remember.

I think maybe why Drukqs codes as earlier as I tend to think of it coming right on the heels of Windowlicker, when in truth there was about 2 years between them.

Thread made me dig out Vanishing Point, which is half MUCH GREATER than I ever remember it being, and half much much worse than I thought. It is, as usual, Bobbie Gillespie who ruins these great grooves by turning up. Again, the best songs are things like "If They Move Kill 'Em" where he does not participate at all.

I want to dig out Echo Dek now, but of course I can't seem to find the damn CD. Hmmmm.

How do I spoil my ballot paper?
― Chewshabadoo, Saturday, May 12, 2012 5:04 AM (Yesterday)

irl lol

Oh yes, I love Echo Dek.

Another of those albums where the remix album is actually better than the real release.

An old style ILM thread, long posts abound..

Am I the only one who still can't choose?

Drukqs feels like longer ago because drill and bass in general just feels like such a late 90s thing, it's had virtually no impact on music from the intervening 10 years, whereas you couldn't say the same about Kid A no matter how anachronistic it felt at the time.

I think WCC is onto something wrt abstraction, but then a lot of the source material Radiohead were drawing on is abstract as hell. But while the abstraction may have explained why listeners were nonplussed at the time that was articulated as "where did the guitars and tunes go?"

I knew several people who, at the time of Kid A's release, were doing big arm-waving "aren't they amazing, innovotaive future electronic muisc wooh!" dancing; generally people who'd paid no attention whatsoever to anything else electronic. Which I found annoying. But that was just my social circle.

guess also I should have raised the issue of innovation as perceived marker of quality on the Autechre vs Aphex Twin thread, when several people were saying that they preferred Autechre to Aphex Twin ~because they were more innovative~ or words to that effect.

who was saying this?

OK, I tossed a coin, and realised without looking at the result what I wanted it to be.

Kid A it is.

About a year ago, it'd have not been a question, but I got the remaster/re-release of "Screama" and realised I like it more now! The tracks I wasn't so bothered about are now things of beauty...

And yes, WCC above, it was always about the 'Don't fight it feel it' for me!

See, if I was to pick one band over the other, it'd be the PScreams. But.. hey.

To me it's always been about "Inner Flight", "Loaded", and "Come Together", all incredible tunes. Agreed that Screamadelica is much more uneven but it's the album I want to listen to more

I've never thought of Screamadelica as uneven. It has a perfect E'd-up arc - Euphoric opening > harder dance tracks > blissed-out epiphany (with undertones of disquiet) during which Bobby G virtually disappears > angst > flashback to earlier > happy ending.

What do people who think it's uneven dislike? Besides, presumably, Damaged.

I'm kind of prejudiced against Kid A for some reason. Despite all the arguments in this thread in favor of it, which are mostly convincing and articulate, I still can't shake the impression of it as a bit of a IDM re-branding exercise. Like, buying the entire back-catalog of Warp are carefully studying it in a pained attempt to overcome the anxiety of following OK Computer. It wasn't that RH were poaching from 'the underground' or 'club culture' - bands like Autechre, Pole, Matmos, Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin or even things like Cornelius and other electronic stuff were immensely popular within indie circles at the time anyway - it was the obvious transparency of moving into that space after their association with mid-90s Brit pop that I honestly found more than a bit uninspired.

That said, I remember reading more sensitive reviewers at the time arguing in favor of their 'ambassadorial role' of 90s post-rave electronica, I felt like I was being unfair with my internal reactions and bought a copy of the album to check out, but it never really clicked with me. It's always felt a bit detached, a bit calculated and left me cold. It wasn't just that my initial reaction stayed with me in a somewhat more repressed way, but I've also never fully grasped why people rated it in the first place.

I don't like the comedown section at all really, I've usually tuned out by Damaged -> I'm Coming Down -> the second Higher Than The Sun. It all feels a bit clunky.

I've also referred to some electronic artists as bands above, but I guess it makes sense in the context of that post.

I like "I'm Coming Down" but yeah that section seems kind of odd, also I feel "Don't Fight It" is really, really long

KID A vs VANISHING POINT/ECHODEK/XRTRMNTR is a fair fight. Vs. SCREAMEDELICA, not so much. "The National Anthem" alone wins, much less the whole rest of the album.

I don't hear any krautrock on Screamadelica really

me neither

yeah "krautrock influence" is such an obtuse term these days and something I've heard used to describe basically anything with a steady drumbeat or a guitar solo

that said Kid A definitely has some kraut in it, Screamadelica, not really

I'm kind of prejudiced against Kid A for some reason. Despite all the arguments in this thread in favor of it, which are mostly convincing and articulate, I still can't shake the impression of it as a bit of a IDM re-branding exercise. Like, buying the entire back-catalog of Warp are carefully studying it in a pained attempt to overcome the anxiety of following OK Computer.

This is the narrative that everyone keeps mentioning when trying to make sense of the record. I suspect it's more based on Thom going on about Warp records in interviews rather than the sound of the album itself. Aside from the vocal effect on the title track and the vaguely Selected Ambient Works quality of Treefingers, I don't hear anything on the rest of the that codes as IDM-inflected?

Everything In Its Right Place & Idioteque don't sound to me like anything any Warp artist was doing at the time.

Crazee bus typing x-post but Bobby G lifted chunks of "Yoo Doo Right" for lyrics on Screamadelica!

& Screamadelica is one of those rare rare albums that (if you take Damaged out) is absolutely perfectly sequenced.

(and I often complain that RH albums are badly sequenced. For a dude who spends so much time DJing Thom has very little sense of set flow. Meow. Which is odd because they seem to get it right live. Maybe I only really love about half of any given RH album. I am the worst fan ever.)

I...guess. I mean that I was blind/believer line is also straight out of Amazing Grace but whatevs

Crazee bus typing x-post but Bobby G lifted chunks of "Yoo Doo Right" for lyrics on Screamadelica!

But what do borrowed lyrics have to do with musical synthesis?

Bobby G lifted chunks of "Yoo Doo Right" for lyrics on Screamadelica!

yeah, but the music doesn't sound anything like can

Trust me, as a child of a priest I know the lyrics to Amazing Grace. That "you made a believer out of me" ain't in it.

But hearing "influence" is an impossible game. P sure Weatherall's "roots of Screamadelica" mixtape had it in it. To give him credit, Bobby G was waxing enthusiastic about krautrock before it was trendy - or maybe I'm saying that bcuz first place I heard of Can was thru JAMC's cover.

ah right it's the blind/but now I see bit
still

think there's a pretty clear pro-krautrock through-line from PiL to JAMC to XTRMNTR to whoever personally

now that I think about it the Mondays sound more krautrock-y than Screamadelica lol

XTRMNTR, I can see

and PiL. not J&MC so much.

they covered Mushroom

Yeah we were at the gig going "Oh, I like that new song "I'm gonna keep my distance"

they covered Mushroom

yeah, i guess that counts as pro-kraut boosterism

Kid A. I've never really been keen on Screamadelica.

OK Computer and In Rainbows are perfectly sequenced I think. Kid A and Amnesiac not so much.

think there's a pretty clear pro-krautrock through-line from PiL to JAMC to XTRMNTR to whoever personally

there was a period in the late 80s into the early 90s when it seemed that everybody was pushing can and krautrock:

1985: the fall - i am damo suzuki
mid 80s: jesus & mary chain - "mushroom"
1988: loop - "mother sky"
1990: thin white rope - "yoo doo right"
1990: flaming lips - "take meta mars" (obvious "mushroom" rip)
1992: kendra smith - "she brings the rain"
1992: th faith healers - "mother sky" (big krautrock boosters in general)
early 90s: stereolab's neu fetish

someone else did a "mother sky" cover in the late 80s, but i can't for the life of me remember who...

left out Spacemen 3 in that lineage

yeah, good point. other points on the curve:

sonic youth claim can as an influence, something i think you can hear in primitive form on early tracks like "the burning spear" and "brave men run"
can as a frequent reference point in reviews of noisy/drony stuff like live skull and a.c. temple during the early 90s
paperhouse records (active 1990-93)

I'd like to thank this thread for getting me to go back and listen to Screamadelica for the first time in a long time. Don't Fight It, Feel It sounds much better than I remember it being, Moving On Up not quite as good as I remember but still good. Those two plus Higher Than The Sun are the big keepers for me. I still kind of hate Loaded but there you go. What also strikes me generally is how slow a lot of the tunes sound now.

In Rainbows is the worst sequenced album in RH's entire bunch!

I think that The Teardrop Explodes can probably go quite early in that sequence, in fact they might even claim the "first!" of indie Krautrock obsession?

This is the narrative that everyone keeps mentioning when trying to make sense of the record. I suspect it's more based on Thom going on about Warp records in interviews rather than the sound of the album itself. Aside from the vocal effect on the title track and the vaguely Selected Ambient Works quality of Treefingers, I don't hear anything on the rest of the that codes as IDM-inflected?

Beats-wise, I certainly can hear Autechre Amber-era on Idioteque or the Anti EP, even... but I'm sure this topic has been discussed a million times. You're probably right to the extent that I'm just prejudiced. My position isn't particularly sophisticated or insightful, I guess I'll be voting for Screamadelica.

Pete Shelley: "I never would have played guitar if not for Marc Bolan and Michael Karoli of Can".

In Rainbows is the worst sequenced album in RH's entire bunch!

― They have fangs, They have teeth! (White Chocolate Cheesecake), Monday, May 14, 2012 6:14 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I couldn't agree with this. I'd say Pablo Honey was the one where they really dropped the ball on the track order.

OK Computer and In Rainbows are perfectly sequenced I think. Kid A and Amnesiac not so much.

― Homosexual Satan Wasp (Matt DC), Monday, May 14, 2012 5:48 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The second half of Kid A (from 'Optimistic' to 'Motion Picture Soundtrack') is impeccably sequenced, it feels continuous and has such a momentum to it. As for the first half, I've never been taken with the positioning of the title track as the 2nd track, but looking at the songs that they had at the time, I'm struggling to think of where else they could have put it.

tru confessions: I was an insufferable 14 y/o 12-CD owning radiohead fanboy ca. kid a. I was absolutely infatuated w them after eating a steady diet of classic rock and metallica and nirvana. they were my gateway into electronic music generally, and specifically krautrock/aphex twin/etc later. whoever said screamadelica was extroverted and kid a was introverted was right. I think that's one of the things that drew me in about it. I listen t kid a "more objectively" now but it has ~personal meaning~ for me.

got into screamadelica years later. love it too. love xtrmntr more tho. feel like "national anthem" and "mbv arkestra (if they move kill em)" are built from similar things (mbv arkestra wins that battle, way more apocalyptic feeling)

screamadelica is fun, kid a isn't. there you go. if it had been screamadelica vs. amesiac it would have been a different story though. amnesiac isn't fun neither, it is stronger than fun, it is scaring.

I'm with MikoMcha all the way here. And yes I hear a clear IDM influence (though perhaps not a wholesale ripping-off of any one artist's steez) running all the way through it. I've changed my mind in more recent times as to whether that's a bad or good thing.

I've decided I prefer Radiohead as a band, Kid A as an album, but the opening verses to Higher Than The Sun do something to me that very little music can.

screamadelica is fun, kid a isn't.

this also resolves the timeless "john coltrane vs the wiggles" debate

i can't believe it but i'm actually voting for Screamadelica. must be that acid trip at Joshua Tree.

wiggles aren't fun but they're stronger than fun, they're scaring.

wiggle and learn

I've never liked The National Anthem. And not just bcz Primal Scream & early Spiritualized and Stereolab and even 13 era Blur did more convincing free jazz freakouts. (so it's not just IDM that snobs can sniff about on this album.)

It's that if you listen to either version of ITMKE, it's that prowling bassline that adds a swagger to the menace which makes it oddly emotionally conflicted. Like yeah, this is evil, but it's seductive evil in that apocalypse. You can see why ppl would go for that evil.

The bassline on National Anthem really lets it down. It's the evil of incompetence rather than the genuine seductive malevolence of ITMKE.

Sorry. ITMKE is possibly my fave Scream song but I have to be in a cage-pacing mood for TNA.

Well, what can I say? For me, Kid A is sequenced fine, the basslines are cool too, and while I'm here.. to all my old bands I ever played bass for: Do not mistake my reticence to overburden your lovely music with overdecorous or fussy bass notes for incompetence, alright? Oh, you did...

ITMKE?

National Anthem was always my fave on Kid A because it sounded like an XTRMNTR out-take to me.

It took me a while too: If They Move, Kill' em.

Aha!

No, that's KMKY

I was wondering what the result was for this one.

Soon come, I guess..

I listened to Kid A on decent headphones for the first time in about a decade. That was interesting. There were all kinds of details I had either never heard or completely forgotten about.

Still prefer Screamadelica tho.

Winner goes on to face Technique. ;-)

!

Was it this thread that suggested I dig out the Apparat DJ Kicks? He seems to have such a high hitrate for picking out sparkly bobbins I will like. Or perhaps he just sparkles everything up. I wish I liked his albums as much as his collabs and DJ sets. I should dig out Walls again. But I listened to his last one and it just sounded entirely too much like U2 in places.

(I know everyone has been saying how much it sounds like Radiohead but it sounds like the bits of RH I don't like.)

I know this is wrong, but I voted for Screamadelica despite not having heard Kid A. But there are so few records I prefer to Screamadelica, what are the odds Kid A would be one of them?

Voted option 3 by using Firebug.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Come on Screamadelica.

Sounds like you enjoyed it too much.

Or he's having a Harry Hill moment

I just don't feel that way about Radiohead...

C'mon Thommy! Don't fight it, feel it!

http://i.imgur.com/KYkY3.jpg

WOO! HEY!

Whoops, sorry, I voted for the other one. ;_;

We're gonna have a good time! We're gonna have a party!

http://www.hipsterrunoff.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/800/thom-yorke-djs-coachella-2-608x608.jpg

We wanna be FREE to DO what we wanna DO.

And we wanna be free to ride our MACHINES without being HASSLED by THE MAN!!!

http://i.imgur.com/q317F.gif

(Shit, I always forget. That line's in the film, but it's not in the song, is it?)

It's that bit at about 3:25 where, after the "I'm gonna get deep down, deep down, woo, hey" spoken bit, and then there's this groovy bit of house piano and then suddenly THE BIGGEST MOST REVERBED OUT GUITAR CHORD IN THE WORLD COMES IN about twice as loud as anything else on the track, and everything else is silent but the bongos and the kick drum, and I have heard that a million times over the past 20 years and it still scares the shit out of me every time. Such a spine-tingling moment.

I used to think that 'just what is it you want to do" and all that was from that episode of Star Trek where the enterprise got 'invaded' by hippies.

like, "We're gonna have a pardee.." was Kirk being sarcastic and getting some bongos out.

Not Knowing the film, obv.

Still, when I hear that dude say "and that's what we're gonna do" etc, and the kid in the background gets all keen..

It always sounds like it's gonna end really badly!

I have no idea if that's what happens in the film or what.

That would be an understatement.

But, still, Nancy Sinatra's hair stays amazing through the whole thing.

Oh, is that where she's called "Mike"?

I just read about the 'influences' of 69 love songs, it mentions her on the "Papa was a rodeo" song page.

Wow! Close!

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

i voted for the winner with literally 1 minute left in the poll

thank you, some dude

closer than i expected. Wrong, but I figured on a Kid A rout.

Solipsism wins on the Internet. Who would have thought.

i voted Screamadelica but know deep down that Kid A is a better record. just have better memories for the former, fair results.

I did not expect it to be that close! Neither did I expect that winner!

I do actually think Screamadelica is the better record, but I think it's probably an age thing, that both Kid A and RH are more fresh in ppl's minds.

It's good to be surprised by a poll you thought was a lock-in though!