Radiohead

"Kid A": the turning point

If any trace of conventionality still lingered in Radiohead's music, it was completely swept away by the double follow-up to "Ok Computer". After that success, the five musicians holed up in the studio for three years in search of a new direction, churning out some thirty songs, which they whittled down and released as two albums just eight months apart — in what has been called a commercially suicidal move from a record-industry standpoint, and (according to more conservative fans) an artistically suicidal one too: rather than resting on their laurels and cranking out pleasant clones of “Karma Police” and “Paranoid Android”, they wrongfooted everyone and switched gears entirely.

The new music, in some respects inspired by the Warp catalogue (with electronic artists including Aphex Twin) and buoyed by fresh jazzy influences, is built through subtraction rather than baroque accumulation. The tracks challenge the rigid boundaries of song form ever more boldly, climbing onto spectral, at times skeletal scaffolding, with unpredictable melodies and an almost total absence of harmony. The minimalism extends to the lyrics, cryptic as they are, and to the overall structure of the albums, in which the sequencing of tracks is perfectly balanced. The new music leans ever more abstractly toward Art.

The two albums share an imploded, anguished, dark, at times funereal atmosphere. “Kid A”, meanwhile, is glacial, wintry, rhythmic. In its first half, the sonic carpet and hypnotic mantra of “Everything In Its Right Place”, the psychoanalytic music-box of “Kid A” (the album is probably a concept album about the birth of the first cloned child), and the terrifying march of “The National Anthem”, which spills over in its finale into an orgy of percussion, bass and horns, all build toward an unsettling, unprecedented climax.

Then the weave of acoustic guitar emerges, and the eerie, nihilistic (yet tender) ballad “How To Disappear Completely”: “Quello lì, non sono io / Io vado dove mi pare, cammino attraverso i muri / volteggio nel Liffey./ Io non sono qui, questo non sta accadendo./ In un attimo me ne sarò andato. Il momento è già passato. Sì, è passato. / Luci stroboscopiche, altoparlanti scoppiati/ Fuochi artificio e tornado…”.

The emotional, cinematic finale, with a 24-piece string orchestra, is enough to bring you to tears.

The album is then split by the watershed moment of "Treefingers", an instrumental that feels like drifting inside an aquarium, perfect for a documentary about the center of the earth or about aliens.

The second part unfolds warmer and more human. The fervor of "Optimistic" is the most classically Radiohead moment here: vocals front and center, razor-sharp guitars, electronic distortions, a verse that climbs, a liberating finale. It's followed by the elusive "In Limbo" ("You're living in a fantasy world / I'm lost at sea / Don't try to bother me / I've lost my way") and the masterpiece (title included) "Idioteque": Thom Yorke steals the best elements of dance music (a devastating rhythm, synthetic percussion), adds a brilliant four-note electric organ sample lifted from Paul Lansky, and grafts on a vocal that's unhinged, frenzied, apocalyptic: "Who's in the bunker, who's in the bunker? Women and children first, women and children first / I laugh until my head comes off / I swallow till I burst / Until I burst / Ice age coming, ice age coming / Let me hear both sides, let me hear both sides / We're not scaremongering, this is really happening, happening / Mobiles switched off, mobiles switched off / Take the money and run, take the money and run". In the background, the clatter of rattling locomotives.

"Idioteque" fades into an odd-metered rhythm foreshadowing a hidden gem: "Morning Bell", a kind of electroencephalogram for organ and drums that slowly explodes (a blast of guitars) and slowly drifts back into convulsive sleep ("Walking, walking, walking, walking…").

"Motion Picture Soundtrack" is the calm, hymn-like closing reflection: "Vino rosso e pillole per dormire. Aiutami a tornare indietro tra le tue braccia. Sesso a buon mercato e film tristi. Aiutami a tornare da dove vengo. Smetti di spedire lettere, le lettere vengono sempre bruciate. It's not like in the movies/ They feed us little white lies. Ti rivedrò nella prossima vita".

"Amnesiac": the evolution

The next life, relentlessly twinned with the previous one, is "Amnesiac", warmer, gentler, more relaxed, but perhaps even more desperate. It's an album about memory, and about the fact that sometimes things we'd forgotten come back to mind.

The tracks that make up the album are anything but leftovers or simple b-sides from the "Kid A" sessions. In them, ever more markedly, emerges Radiohead's detachment from the standard song form, in favour of an experimentalism that's (almost) never gratuitous. From the mood that characterised its twin album we find an ever-greater leaning towards electronics and editing processes (the "spinning" loops and backwards vocal of "Like Spinning Plates" and the vocal magma of "Pull/Pulk Revolving Doors"). Alongside these, more straightforwardly "pop" compositions are paired in, like the gorgeous "Knives Out" or the acid club rhythm of "I Might Be Wrong" or the political and lyrical urgency of "Dollars And Cents".

The record opens with the velvety, sophisticated "Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box": and the track's many small inventions really do seem like "sardines packed inside a crushed tin box", from the synthetic drums to the catchy bassline, from the stammering background noises to the disarming message of the lyrics: "After years of waiting, nothing came/ While your life flashed before your eyes/ You realise... I'm a reasonable man, get off my case, get off my case/ After years of waiting/ nothing came. And you realise you've been looking, looking in the wrong place".

It's an enigmatic appetizer; the main course is “Pyramid Song”: simply an inspired, moving poem (an octave) about death, told through the eyes of someone already far from this world: “I jumped in the river, and what did I see? Black-eyed angels swam with me.”

A moon full of stars and astral cars. All the things I used to see

All my lovers were there with me. My whole past and future.

And we all went to heaven on a little rowboat. And there was nothing to be afraid of, and nothing to doubt." Anyone can hear how striking they are: the piano's limping gait, the drums entering off the beat, and the string arrangement.

The following "Pulk-Pull Revolving Doors" sounds like an assault on the ears, but it's the only song capable of following, in a stroke of clever contrast, "Pyramid Song". It's a fitting sonic punishment, without which (by hitting skip) "Amnesiac" would gasp rather than flow, and in which Thom Yorke vents his obsession with doors, metaphorically extolling every kind of them.

We thus move into the heart of the album: "You and Whose Army" begins as a soft, slurred jab at Tony Blair ("Come on, come on, you and whose army?/ You and your cronies .../ Holy Roman Empire/ Come on if you think/ You can take us on") and ends by overwhelming the listener with a dazzling glide into the infinite, leaving them adrift in a whirl of pensive melancholy: "You forget so easily.../ Tonight we ride/ Ghost horses."

Morale is lifted by “I Might Be Wrong”, whose obsessive riff might recall “The National Anthem”; but the pace here is more insinuating, subtler, almost trendy: “I might be wrong /but I've been imagining a light coming near. Had my time/ I think I was there in the story/ Open and shut, back and forth, just like a lie. Baby, screw them, oh forget them, we don't need them... What would I do? If I did not have you. Open your mouth, let it out/ Let's go under the waterfall. Have yourself a happy little moment. It's nothing. Nothing...”. The peak of this moving lightness is reached with “Knives Out”, a delicate, delightful song about cannibalism, and with the mannered, glockenspiel-laden acoustic remake of “Morning Bell”.

“Dollars And Cents”, a song at once light and heavy, built on a catchy bassline and brushed drums, rails against globalisation: “We are the dollars and cents, the pounds and pence, and the mark and the yen, we're gonna crack your little souls.../ It's all gone, the little baby's dead, it's all gone...”.

Then there's the most difficult and fascinating song, "Like Spinning Plates," which, built from reversed sounds, transforms live into a beguiling, suspended piano ballad: but in this version it truly conjures the image of spinning blades on which the lyrics hover: "While you're wasting your time on nothing / I'm living in a fantasy / You feed me to the lions / A delicate balance / And it's like I'm the sharp blades spin / I'm living in a fantasy that just won't budge / And it's like the sharp blades spin / My body's floating down the muddy river." And what more unsettling closer could Radiohead have chosen for the album than a piece of futurist jazz that undercuts all the electronic doodling that came before? Performed with the accompaniment of octogenarian jazzman Humphrey Lyttelton, "Life In A Glasshouse" is a treatise on the anguish of media overexposure: "I'd really like to sit and chat with someone / I'd really like to stay and argue / I'd really like to sit and chew the fat with someone / But someone's listening / We're all hungry for a lynching / That's a strange thing to be missing / You should turn the other cheek / Living in a glasshouse." A twist ending that evokes, in funereal guise, the marching brass bands of New Orleans.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

06/11/2006