the title track is the biggest departure from their previous work. thom recorded speaking the lyrics into a mic, and jonny playing them back as melodies, using probably some kind of software package. title actually refers to computer programme of children's voices named kid a. impressive stop start drumming, that kind of remains ever present by phil counting in the next beat by tapping his sticks together, really well done.

complex string arrangement elevates how to disappear to new heights. inventive vocal work by thom, singing different melodies over the same repetitive (that word again) chord progression.

national anthem melds punishing drumming (that kind of subtley speeds up towards the end) with a wild brass section and a doomy ever present bassline that doesn't change throughout. the horns comprising of a jazz octet are conducted by jonny, manage to lift the track out of potential dirge territory, in a similar way the strings do on the previous track.

treefingers is lovely...and mysterious, would be perfect for the opening credits of one of the alien films. impossible to pin down, shifting chords are complimented by ambient effects. (possibly supplied by guitars, shock horror!) the timing is kind of ever shifting which keeps things interesting till its conclusion.

optimistic is the only song that is structured like songs from previous albums. a lovely swooping melody leads into the verse that contains primal lyrics ("big fish eat the little ones") complimented by a furious tom tom assault. excellent chorus, and when the swooping melody from the intro returns at the end, with raging guitars and phil's rapid drum fills, you can't fail to be uplifted.

in limbo returns to similar territory to previous tracks, with yorke trying different melodies over an unchanging chord progression. completely guitar based this time though.

idioteque has beats and samples for the first time in their recording history, (the samples culled from two records i can honestly say i've never heard of). lovely chorus, but the song kind of fails to go anywhere after the second one, and when yorke's vocals return at the close, they are kind of frustratingly muffled.

there's definetly more to morning bell, a beautiful melody that recalls rabbit in your headlights, and some actual lead guitar work makes an appearance in parts. interesting lyrics too - "where'd you park the car", "you can keep the furniture", "cut the kids/keys in half". along with some of the more memorable lyrics you can actually make out on the title track, this one features some great evocations from yorke, who i think is probably improving as a lyricist all the time, when you think of the embarassing angst ridden efforts on pablo honey.

motion picture soundtrack, an old track, throws harps in the mix. which actually make the choir thrown in sound less heavy handed than on tracks like lucky and exit music, which is a considerable achievement.

as is the album. new territory is staked out all over the place, that for the most part works. the ascension into heaven bit at the end is lovely too. the only big band in the world worth bothering with really, it'll be very interesting to see where they go next.

Everybody's got an opinion on this one
Well, here's mine, the one single opinion out of all of them that's actually right. Ha. Just kidding. Anyhow, no its not as good as the Bends or OK Computer, but its still a great album, unlike say a certain followup album of Kid A reject songs. Its flawed, not as good as it could be, the hype for it is incredibly annoying, but five star material? Yeah.

It starts out with the incredibly pretentious Everything in Its Right Place, which is probably a song whining about how Thom Yorke was supposedly having a mental breakdown when Radiohead was touring for OK Computer. But its still a great song, kind of funny with the messed up vocals and cool keyboard noises. Then comes the title track, which is just generally annoying and you'll want it to get over. It has these pattering drum noises and jack-in-the-box keyboard notes that remind me of music you'd play in a baby's crib or something, its kind of dumb.

Then comes The National Album (excellent title) which has this really groovy, addictive bass line and ends with a bunch of annoying horns blaring. Supposedly Radiohead was trying to convey the feeling of being in a traffic jam and being frustrated or something to the listener. They shouldn't have bothered, I'm not the kind of person who wants to plunk down my cash to that. I hate it when art statements are made at the expense of the song.

How to Disappear Completely is a more straightforward guitar ballad, a great song, and then comes Treefingers which is a good nap, a bunch of boring synthesizer puddling ambience. Just compare it to NIN's A Warm Place, its kind of the same idea except NIN did the job 10 times better back in '94. Optimistic, the song that got all the radio airplay, is the best song on the album, one of the few traditionally structured songs on here but still very experimental in tone. In Limbo is alright, Idioteque is good but doesn't fit the album at all, Morning Bell is superb, and Motion Picture Soundtrack is a very modern sounding song that sounds exactly like what the title says it is. In many ways this whole album sounds like a soundtrack to a movie instead of an album of songs, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

So even though it sounds like I'm ripping on many of the songs, why is it still great? Well, the main reason is that Nigel Godrich is an excellent producer, and the entire album sounds just gorgeous, very state-of-the-art, probably in the same way that Dark Side of the Moon sounded when it was first released. Believe me, without the superb production it wouldn't be half of what it is. Radiohead have become very pretentious and over-the-top on this album, and sometimes that will annoy you because they're really laying it all on a bit thick. Also, even though there's not too many truly innovative things about this album other than the production, it does a good job showcasing the sounds of a bunch of other innovative bands. Idioteque reminds me of Aphex Twin meets Autechre, Treefingers has a Brian Eno ambience to it, and the first song even reminds me of Moby for some reason, don't ask why. I think Optimistic is the best song here, and the album really would have been more coherent if they had put more songs like it on and ditched songs like Kid A, Idioteque and Treefingers. These songs aren't bad songs, but they just don't all work together because there's just no coherence here. The main flaw with the album is that the moods just change too much from song to song, and that's kind of jarring, you can never really get into the album all the way. I usually find myself skipping around certain tracks on the album, it sounds better that way.

Oh, and by the way, in case it wasn't apparent enough already, this album is the cap to a tryptch they started with The Bends. The Bends is rock, OK Computer is rock meets experimentation, and Kid A is full-blown experimentation. All three fit together perfectly, with OK being the glue that holds them together. Kid A isn't as purely listenable as the other two, and that's why it isn't quite as good even if it is more "out there". Anyhow, I'm sick of talking about this album, Radiohead annoy me even if they are massively talented. Later.

music for sheep who don't want to be sheep
Pointless, redundant, possibly the worst form of per capita matter that has ever taken up space on this earth. I was not a huge fan of OK Computer, but I liked it. I felt the same about the bends. But this album is just plain trash. How is it getting five star reviews you ask? I will tell you. The people who are giving this album five stars are people who call themselves "anti-corporate," hiding behind such facades as "if you like Kid A don't listen to Britany Spears" or "not for people who listen to corporate radio" or "this is a very deep and emotional album." To the contrary, I hate Britany Spears, I don't listen to the radio, and I can say this is not a deep emotional album. This is pure unadulterated crap. It is deep for the sake of being deep, and with this ideology comes the making of shallow people listening to "deep" music, or is "deep" people listening to shallow music? Either way, the record is crap. You think it's groundbreaking? The ground has been broken by bands like Rush and Sigur Ros. Why do overrated bands get to produce crap like this and sell millions of copies? Because the sheepish people who don't consider themselves sheep because they listen to "abstract" music buy it in order to get their "anti-normal points." Who keeps count anyway?

Anyone who actually has a sense of what it is to listen to music for the actual enjoyment of it should stay as far away from this album as possible.

my favorite
I'm not going to say that Kid A is the best radiohead cd, but it's my favorite. I decided this while I listened to it in its uninterrupted glory during a two hour late night walk through suburbia with my dog. It is an experience; this album and Amnesiac are the ones you have to hear all the way through in one go because it's hard to appreciate most of the tracks by themselves, because they don't really make sense in small pieces. If someone played you treefingers or in limbo by itself you might not remember what they sounded like afterwards at all.
But it's hard to describe the experience. Everything in its Right Place is probably my favorite radiohead song ever. It defines the mood. Verse chorus verse does not exist starting now; Thom Yorke will mumble into his vocoder or whatever and then repeat short lines over and over in the songs where you can understand him (besides national anthem and morning bell). The acoustic songs like national anthem, optimistic and limbo are kind of uneventful because they really just float in the air for a while. Kid A and Treefingers are little more than atmosphere pieces, and Idioteque is an atmosphere piece with an unexpected club beat. Morning Bell, possibly the only "real" song on the cd, is kind of quietly intense, even more intense than the screaming horns and raging bassline in national anthem. And just when you thought it was all over, Motion Picture Soundtrack confuses you beyond all rational limits (there are even harps and a long long silence in the middle) and does something indescribable to your soul if you're really immersed in the music. It probably makes more sense under the influence of illegal chemical substances, so i've heard, but it takes a lot of patience and almost no expectations to have the love for this music that I have.
But to clear things up this is NOT A ROCK ALBUM by any stretch of the imagination. There are NO HOOKS and NO SINGLES or anything. It is about as abtruse and intentionally inscrutable as anything radiohead has done up to this point, so tread carefully.

Brave New World
I can't help but think of a term thrown around in the seventies when I hear Kid A: Future Shock. The idea was that modern technology was transforming our society at such speed that the world one was born into would bear little resemblance to the one of his/her adulthood. While "OK Computer" outwardly attacked the homogenization of modern society, "Kid A" works its way inside-out from the belly of the beast; here, Radiohead captures the language of isolation, and expresses the apathy, the ennui, and, finally, the repressed violence of a lost generation.
"Kid A" is set in a very different context from "OK Computer," embracing keyboard sounds, filters, computer processing: this furthers the overall metaphor by placing more distance between the listener and the artist. "Soundscape" is a term thrown around when people refer to this CD. The songs are set into large, open musical spaces that give a drifting feeling to all the songs; this effect is brought foward in the instrumental "Treefingers" as a strong expression of helplessness.
"Treefingers" is a bridge between "Kid A's" primary section, which is more contemplative and complacent, and the secondary, dealing more with anger and violence aimlessly escaping into its evironment of complacency. "How to Dissapear Completely's" refrain "I'm not here, this isn't happening" is a disassociation from the world and from one's self. It's mirror image, "Idiotecque" rebels against this in its warning "We're not scaremongering, this is really happening;" the voice now looks with fear and hatred.
What begins in the lines of "Everything in its right place/yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon" (ie a good, organized life in which one feels a nagging sense of incompletion) later comes to terms in Morning Bell: "You can keep the furniture, A bump on the head...Where'd you park the car? Clothes are on the lawn..." A divorce scenario ("Cut the kids in half") describes the breakdown of and breakaway from modern institutions and societal pressures.
This might seem ridiculously analytical, but Kid A is that kind of CD. As "Everything..." concludes "There are two colors in my head:" the noise of modern society, of modern living, fills our minds all the time, and is often at odds with itself. Radiohead attempts to come to terms with this dichotomy, or, perhaps, decides, "I think you're crazy, maybe..."
How is it that Kid A's opening track, laden with an electronic vocal stuttering "bleh, bluh-bleh bleh bluh" is the most fascinating statement made in rock & roll this year? Because somehow, even when Radiohead blathers and blips nonsense, it's profound. The band's future-perfect musical grammar may be hard to decipher, and the melody is even more subliminal, but the journey traveled with Radiohead reveals them to be not only rock music's greatest adventurers in 2000, but teachers as well. --Beth Massa
With every record, Radiohead jump off higher and higher cliffs, daring fans to take the plunge in their artistic feats of derring-do. The journey from that scratchy bit of raw guitar angst in "Creep" (from 1993's Pablo Honey) to any song on Kid A amounts to a high-wire act that few, if any, bands in popular music have ever attempted. It's hard to believe both records come from the same planet, much less the same band. Likewise, the grandiose, Pink Floyd-esque thematic scope of 1997's extraordinary OK Computer is nowhere to be found here. Quiet, contemplative, and less confrontational, it opens with a lack of bombast, as "Everything in Its Right Place" builds tension with ghostly voiceovers, a dry pulse, and a shadowy organ motif. That tension appears over and over on Kid A. On "How to Disappear Completely," the unsettled, atonal keyboard waxing in the background offsets the plaintive Thom Yorke vocal, and on "Idioteque," detached, inorganic rhythms make the melody's despondent aimlessness that much more nerve-racking. Throughout, Radiohead fearlessly explore dissonance and structure, melding twisted, Brian Eno-meets-Aphex Twin sonic landscapes with utter discontent in the world around them. They may sometimes overreach, letting artsy ambition prevent them from giving us the arena rock-god goodies. But their commitment to restless creativity also yields pleasures that don't fade but instead become more resonant upon repeated listenings. If OK Computer was rock's most relevant expression of millennial angst, Kid A is the opposite; it's the 21st century's first record that sounds like the future, barely caring what that Y2K fuss was all about and much more worried about what the hell we're all supposed to do now. --Matthew Cooke