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Radiohead: Kid A
BY JAMES SUMNER
First things first: no one can pretend that the "Album of the Year" is truly the best album recorded in a given year. Aside from the issues of personal taste and aesthetic judgment, it's taken for granted that the year's nominees are prominent names with albums that won significant critical and commercial success. The question, then, is which of these artists represents a definite direction music is taking, and which album will likely prove the most influential in the coming years. Quite simply, which album will be remembered?
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From the moment of its release, Radiohead's Kid A was seen as a landmark album, hailed as the first successful assimilation by a major rock band of the non-rock languages of ambient and electronic artists. Unlike the electronica hype's misshapen offspring, Radiohead took loops, echoes, and noises for entirely new instruments, reinventing not just themselves but the parameters of the alt-rock genre.
Radiohead had already established itself as the voice of claustrophobic anxiety, but in Kid A, the absence of traditional instruments transforms anxiety into a quiet, ominous dream. Songs are drawn out slowly, subtly; hypnotic rhythms flow in and out, vocals are subdued, distorted, and wrung into abstract, unintelligible sound. On the opening track, "Everything in Its Right Place," the samplings and loops of Thom Yorke's voice become a self-accompanying instrument. Even when a driving bass line opens "National Anthem," the appearance of a jarring horn section that dominates more than half the track carries the song into a new, unsettling sonic landscape. The album eschews easily discernible hooks, opting either for sparse arrangements of alien noises or maddening layers of sound. The closer, "Motion Picture Soundtrack," deserves a whole new Grammy category: "Best Use of Harp in a Non-Classical Recording."
After OK Computer, Radiohead was dubbed "the band that saved rock from itself." With Kid A, the band may have saved more genres than anyone realized. (Capitol)
All materials © 2001 The Yale Herald, Inc., and its staff.
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