Radiohead - Kid A / Amnesiac Poll

hot take: hunting bears has always sounded amazing.

(but yes, this new remaster absolutely rewards headphone listening for longtime fans of the material.)

Pull/Pulk sounded a lot less opaque too. Like, I could hear Thom was saying actual words and not just mumbling through an FX unit

Huh? I thought it was confirmed that these weren’t remastered at all? I think the only change is in the half speed vinyl cut?

maybe i'm just listening more intently this time around? i just assumed these were newly spit-shined or whatever. however the case, these albums have always sounded fantastic and always will.

The radiohead subreddit kind of confirms it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/radiohead/comments/qpwmrs/psa_on_kid_amnesia_neither_kid_a_nor_amnesiac_are/

There’s been dozen of threads confirming it’s the same release. It should sound better in vinyl format either way.

XP ah right I was wondering if it was a remaster or if my ears are just working differently now

Don’t fix what’s not broken imho. The originals still sound great to my ears. There’s very little things I’d change.

I’d definitely remaster Hail to the Thief if they release a 20th anniversary thing for that one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xUC-FYazdU

^^^^ This is the very first-ever performance of “How to Disappear Completely” (back when it was known as “How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found”). I far prefer it to the album version.

it took years of listening to kid a before the album version started to seem like the "real" one

that performance truly was a benefit for the bootleggers, lol!

Ummm... I don't hear how that fuzzy live bootleg is really any better or all that different from the studio version?

must agree, sounds at that point like an ok computer outtake. still quite good, but.

and again: much as i love them, i'm not really at the level of fandom that merits appreciating bootlegs with radiohead.

contradiction: the live performances of the king of limbs era material is the definitive way to hear that stuff, but that's probably the consensus by this point.

it's not about the quality or the composition, it's that it was a very early circulated radiohead bootleg, the highest quality one of an unreleased song. everyone listened to it for years and years before the studio version was released

i think i was afraid that would happen to me with "pyramid song" bc i listened to the bootleg from the tibetan freedom concert that's just thom on piano like, over and over again for a solid year before amnesiac came out. the studio version was better though

The KID A MNESIA exhibition / game is astounding. Makes up for how mildly disappointing the physical release for the anniversary was.

it's pretty good yeah

people are currently working on extracting all the audio from it, there's a lot of interesting stuff found already. looking forward to digging through that

there's a 7 minute "pulk/pull" with the chords from the "true love waits" version but the "pulk/pull" vocals

where do i see / hear / experience this exactly?

https://kida-mnesia.com/
https://www.epicgames.com/store/p/kid-a-mnesia-exhibition

& someone's dumping some of the stems & oddities as they go through them here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10FpF2mwKf9ESb8F0OIXOjUplKkOJa49q

but it's very incomplete at the moment, there should be a better collection up within a few days. some of this stuff isn't anywhere (that i could tell anyway) to be found in the exhibition either

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12lJ23Bobg6qt00Z35vbxf1Fwo3Ez48T-

oh this is apparently all the audio files but there's hundreds of them & they're unlabelled

nice!

this was the hope. Sweet. Can't wait to get into this.

Mailed my vinyl back to Toronto. Kid A was a mess!

I find it hard to listen to scuzzy bootlegs of *any* artist tbh.
But bootleg audio aside, that version is pretty uninteresting compared to the album version. No cross-rhythm with the bassline, boring strummy guitar, no strings. Meh.

The most interesting ones I heard were the vocals from pulk/pull without fx that makes Thom sound like a soulless salesman and an 8 bit optimistic.

the "8 bit optimistic" was just an organ track that must have been absolutely buried in the original version or something

I don't know what I expected but this is all surprisingly expensive imho - https://merch.kida-mnesia.com/

It is. It's cute that QR codes leading to products are scattered around the game... when i exited a place there were bears holding up a sign with a code... leading to their cookies. The bears are aggressive salesmen. 25 quid though, and probably as much again in postage...nuh uh.

The free game is great though.

Kudos to the @LandsEnd designer who got this past corporate. pic.twitter.com/2shIx5fMT5

— Sam Van Hallgren (@samvanhallgren) December 10, 2021

Reminds me of this all-time great ILM thread:

Photoshop/MS Paint Nike and other evil corporations ruining famous album covers

Sadly, most of them are gone forever.