Radiohead - Kid A / Amnesiac Poll

Everything In Its Right Place was the perfect introduction to this new phase. I remember loving it the very first time I heard it and then losing faith when the title track slowed things down. I have a vendetta against momentum-killing second tracks (see also: Daft Punk's Game of Love).

Also, the title track sort of does sound like a pallid imitation of Warp whereas Everything is entirely its own entity, and joyous in a way. It's almost rave-like live.

also the national anthem is really pretty awesome, it wasn't my favorite at first but now it's one of the highlights of kid a for me, wish they explored those free jazz experiments a little more

Gigamesh unearthed the deep house track Radiohead was clearly trying to make here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HzTdmeSgjU

I was holding out for an Orbital remix at the time. Would have paid good money for a version with a boshing kickdrum.

My mate reckons the opening chords of EIIRP sound like slipping into a warm bath.

I have a vendetta against momentum-killing second tracks (see also: Daft Punk's Game of Love).

is OTM. A total sequencing faux-pas. Especially since it's usually track 2 I tend to skip to if I need to sample an album very very quickly.

The Gigamesh remix of Once in a Lifetime is amazing. Looking forward to hearing this.

Kid A is still my favorite radiohead song. The first half of the Kid A album is basically all the radiohead I really need, maybe throw in "There There" as a bonus track.

Kid A was a massive stoner album among my friends in college. I remember thinking of it back then as sort of a millenial update of Dark Side of the Moon

OTM in many ways

I never could understand how they managed to remain quite so commercially successful.

They are very good at hooks despite themselves.

just can't get my head around this being a stoner album, or even a "social environment" album. Don't think I can remember a time I ever listened to 'Kid A' in a social context. Tried to get my other half (who'd stopped listening to Radiohead in the 90s) to listen to Kid A with me once but she wasn't interested. Maybe Amnesiac...? I'm sure I listened to that with friends once... I did buy Amnesiac the same day I first tried berries though.

my stoner friends enjoyed amnesiac but found it much more alienating than kid a

They are very good at hooks despite themselves.

― I wish to incorporate disco into my small business (chap), Thursday, February 13, 2014 3:48 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Mmmmmmmmhhhhhh..... Don't really think that's a good enough explanation for me. Pyramid Song's not exactly a hook fest and I can't think of that much post-OKC stuff that would count as hummable in a commercial way. I might be wrong (pun intended)

"Jumped in the river what did I see" is a big hook imo. Don't think a band can get as big as they are without a significant element of catchiness.

friends who can get stoned to kid a and not be totally weird about it are the best friends imo

Pyramid Song's not exactly a hook fest

yes it is, actually

I'd say Kid A is to Autechre as Remain in Light is to Fela Kuti - there's a marked influence but they're not at all the same beast.

This is really OTM; I thought the "just copying Warp" criticism was lazy and just an old standby of the Radiohate crowd. I mean certainly there's some Ae influence but it's worth noting that Autechre themselves were onto things like Confield back then which is really freakin far away from what Kid A was doing...if anything it's aping bits of early Ae albums like Incunabula or Amber. I didn't know anything about Warp when I first heard Kid A - my initial impression is that it captured the despondent feeling of Kraftwerk's Radioactivity, which I've never heard another album quite get before.

I tend to agree with whoever it is around here that posits that Kid A's critical rep owes a lot to its sequencing. Skip the first two tracks and start with "The National Anthem" and I think a lot of the album's "strangeness" dissolves.

This thread is doing what I thought impossible; it makes me want to listen to Radiohead again

xP: I mean, the piano riff, the various vocal phrases, the wordless "Ooh" phrase that acts as a bridge, the bassline; the only reason the song wouldn't be considered "catchy" is because it's in a stately 12/8 meter which makes the rhythm sound more complicated and abstract than it actually is.

Rabbit in Your Headlights seems like the first Kid A song in some respects.

Talk Show Host a little bit too.

When Kid A came out all the major UK print titles gave it lukewarm reviews and then I noticed an alternative consensus - mostly online (this was around the time I discovered ILX and Pitchfork), possibly more US than UK — that saw it in Dark Side of the Moon terms: a serious, forward-thinking, gloomy-yet-comforting rock record that sounded good stoned. It was weird seeing its rep change from self-indulgent misfire to decade-defining classic, although to me it's always been somewhere in the middle.

I'd say "Meeting in the Aisle" predicts this era the clearest.

og morning bell

^^^ listen to this brad

I am surprised by all of the negativity around "Knives Out" upthread, I can't think of a single bad thing to say about that song.

Yeah it's the OKC b-sides like Melatonin and A Reminder which preceded this era and stopped Kid A feeling like such a huge jump into the unknown. It's kind of cool that in retrospect the b-sides can be seen as experiments that point to the future rather than throwaway lesser-songs that weren't considered good enough for the album.

I felt like they'd made Knives Out already. Always equated it as being part two of another song (Karma Police?). BTW Karma Police is probably my second or third favourite Radiohead song. Did we ever do a Radiohead tracks poll?

I felt like they'd made Knives Out already.

The chord structure and texture are somewhat similar to the first section of Paranoid Android.

Yeah, probably that.

It was weird seeing its rep change from self-indulgent misfire to decade-defining classic, although to me it's always been somewhere in the middle

That process you describe isn't its reputation changing though, since the initial consensus from the print titles (dud) remained. There are still plenty of people who (rightly, in my view) view it as a self-indulgent misfire. FWIW I would say that your description of "a serious, forward-thinking, gloomy-yet-comforting rock record" actually fits OK Computer much better than it fits Kid A.

i find OKC harsh and grating now

og morning bell

Yeah this song is really, really amazing

pyramid song easy

Did we ever do a Radiohead tracks poll?

I'm due to run one in about 10 polls time.

Voted for Knives Out here.

Really looking forward to that nate.

This was their peak for me. Particularly impressive was how the songs gained strength live; previously, ('97-'98) they were too concerned with matching the studio arrangements to really dig in. But on the '01 show I saw was brilliant; they loosened up, and everything swung mightily.

Voted "The National Anthem" for a number of reasons, but particularly for its distinctly Bill Dixon-esque trumpet solo.

I like "Everything in it's right place" best, because if I hear it, it's because I just put on Kid A to listen to

Pyramid Song

The Airbag EP (on which Meeting In The Aisle & all the pre-KidA b-sides were gathered) is still one of my favourite Radiohead releases.

Also, I love the deliberate "we're going to go away and do something else for a while" sequencing of Kid A, now, though at the time it was quite perplexing.

I was 17 years old and at college studying music when Kid A came out, and I distinctly remember the album being one of the most eagerly awaited releases of that year, if not the most eagerly awaited. On the day of release, I remember pretty much everyone including my tutors were waiting for lunchtime to arrive, so they could dash into town to pick up a copy. My first memory of hearing Kid A was in the room at college where the stereo was. Our tutor has came back with a copy from the nearest record store fairly quickly, and there must have been about 4 or 5 of us in total sat in this room desperate to hear what the album sounded like. Many others decided to stay out of earshot, because they wanted to prolong the excitement by waiting until they got home to play their copies.

I remember the reaction to Kid A being extremely mixed, with a wide variety of differing opinions. Our Recording Techniques tutor was a Warp Records fan, and loved it. On the other end of the spectrum, I remember one of my classmates, a U2/Muse/Smashing Pumpkins fan, absolutely loathed the record and found very little to enjoy. His reaction was "there's hardly any guitars on it, and not many 'proper' songs and the ones that are 'proper' songs aren't as good as the ones they've put out before", and I remember 'Treefingers' in particular being singled out for a lot of criticism ("it doesn't do anything, it's not even a song, it doesn't go anywhere").

For me, I didn't really have a problem with Kid A... I was going through a big prog rock phase at the time, and I'd kinda grown up on stuff like Kraftwerk and '80s synthpop, so I really didn't have a problem with the approach that Radiohead went for. I definitely wasn't scratching my head and cursing the band for "turning their back on rock" or anything, like a lot of people seemed to be doing at the time. I guess that during the Britpop era, the guitar was seen as having a stamp of authenticity to it ("Real rock, real music"), and I still think there was still a fair amount of this kind of attitude in the air when Kid A first hit the shelves.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that even with all this in mind, Kid A was not an immediate album for me. The album eventually clicked over the course of a few nights where I made it my bedtime listening album. Every night, I'd go to bed, turn of all the light, whack the headphones on, try not to analyse what was going on and just soak myself in the sound of it. Eventually, it clicked into place.

I'm reading a lot about the song sequencing of Kid A in this thread and how it may have been a barrier to people "gaining access" (for want of a better term) to the album. I definitely agree that putting the title track as the second song wasn't the greatest move (it's probably one of the least accessible tracks on the album and placing it as a second track does kill the momentum), and the fact that they backloaded the album with all of the more accessible tracks and frontloaded it with the more "challenging" ones might have been a barrier for some. However, I can't really think of any other way it possibly could have been sequenced. I've tried, over the years, as have many Radiohead fans, to sequence this album using a combo of Kid A and Amnesiac tracks and the album just loses a part of its identity as a result. Weird.

His reaction was "there's hardly any guitars on it, and not many 'proper' songs and the ones that are 'proper' songs aren't as good as the ones they've put out before", and I remember 'Treefingers' in particular being singled out for a lot of criticism ("it doesn't do anything, it's not even a song, it doesn't go anywhere").

Did he write for NME, Melody Maker, Q, Mojo or Select? Because that was definitely the vibe.

I do remember feeling like the guitar songs were overpraised because they were something to cling on to, and they're fine, but they pale next to Idioteque or Everything.

Also, prior to Kid A there'd been a few mid '90s bands that were using Pro Tools and samplers and trying to do something else to get out of Britpop/Britrock straitjacket: Blur had 13, which in spite of having hit singles, perplexed many, there was Mansun with Six, Super Furry Animals had made Guerrilla which was the most 'electronic' record they'd made up to that point... hell, even Suede had a go at branching out with Head Music. But still with even all of those albums in mind, I don't think many people were prepared for Kid A. I think most people were expecting them to take the template of OK Computer and do a New Jersey.

The OK Computer B-sides were more in keeping with that late 90s trend: dance remixes, trip hop influences, etc. Nobody else made a record as opaque as Kid A. Even 13 had Coffee & TV, Tender and the whole break-up narrative. I think Yorke's decision to stop writing obviously coherent lyrics was as bold (and, to some, alienating) as what they did musically.

I do remember feeling like the guitar songs were overpraised because they were something to cling on to, and they're fine, but they pale next to Idioteque or Everything.

― What is wrong with songs? Absolutely nothing. Songs are great. (DL), Thursday, February 13, 2014 9:01 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have a memory of several people doing a u-turn on Kid A when the video to 'Idioteque' was being broadcast on MTV2, and people saw them performing the track live as a band. All of a sudden people were saying "hang on, this song may not be a guitar song but it's a good Radiohead song".

Then there was the other group of people, the ones who were holding out hope that Kid A was the "experimental" record and that Amnesiac would be the return of the Radiohead of The Bends and OK Computer. When this didn't prove to be the case, those who weren't thrilled with Radiohead's new sound knew that this is the direction in which the band would be going and jumped ship entirely.

I think Yorke's decision to stop writing obviously coherent lyrics was as bold (and, to some, alienating) as what they did musically.

― What is wrong with songs? Absolutely nothing. Songs are great. (DL), Thursday, February 13, 2014 9:10 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, I truly agree with this. One of my first impressions of the album was "wow, these songs don't really have many lyrics to them". On OK Computer you had lyrics like 'Subterranean Homesick Alien', which is very much a "story" lyric. Kid A's lyrics (with the exception of 'Optimistic') are far more minimal, especially on tracks like 'Everything In Its Right Place' and 'The National Anthem'. The upshot of this approach, is that while there's a basic framework there, the listener is left to fill in the blanks.

By this I mean: is 'Everything In Its Right Place' about OCD? Is it about feeling great knowing that a shit day is behind you? Is it about sudden clarity of the mind after a period of uncertainty and muddled thinking? I suppose it depends on who is listening, and the mindset of the person listening.

I remember Kid A being the first album where I noticed that lots of people had listened to the leaked album before it was actually released.

yeah it's kinda simultaneously the last big pre-napster album and the first big post-napster album. i can remember wuxtry had a promo they would play and ppl would just hang out there listening to it, one of the last big midnight releases i can remember also. it's weird the different reactions - in the states it seems like it was embraced pretty much immediately, the only notable critical pocket of resistance i can remember was fucking hornby in the nyer (i remember sasha frere jones making fun of either this or amnesiac in some review, maybe spin?, but it was more from a 'lol these lyrics are terrible' than a 'why so difficult? why not play proper songs???' angle). hugely popular album that autumn, it and stankonia were nearly unavoidable.

Treefingers or hunting bears

Everything in it's right place