Product Description

1997's OK COMPUTER turned the rock world on its ear by bringing visionary neo-prog rock touches to a Britpop format. Consequently, KID A was one of the most anticipated releases of its era. This limited edition comes in a fine, rigid, oversized high-quality glossy paginated format, with artwork by the same hand as the regular edition, and with speculative philosophical jottings heading each page. No secret booklet, though.
On KID A, Thom Yorke's passionate wailing is put through the aural wringer, and the band's previous nimbly orchestrated full-frontal sonic assault is replaced by full-frontal electric piano, to iconoclastic effect. The ambient underpinnings and garbled vocals of "Everything in Its Right Place", and the instrumental "Treefingers", the electronic beats of "Idioteque", and Yorke's processed voice on the titletrack will come as quite a shock to diehard '70s rockers who spent the late '90s deifying Radiohead as heirs to the Pink Floyd throne. But these touches work brilliantly, while the more organic elements, such as the jazzy horn section on "The National Anthem", and the comparatively conservative arrangement (though there's some unsettlingly atonal orchestration lurking here, too) of "How to Disappear Completely" provide a counterpoint to all this incipient modernism.

Track Listing

1. Everything In Its Right Place
2. Kid A
3. National Anthem
4. How To Disappear Completely
5. Treefingers
6. Optimistic
7. In Limbo
8. Idioteque
9. Morning Bell
10. Motion Picture Soundtrack

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1347 in Music
• Released on: 2000-10-02
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
Radiohead may well be the most courageous band in Britain. Their second album, The Bends, was a success both critically and commercially, and they followed it up with an album of epic prog-rock, OK Computer, that would have destined a lesser band to commercial failure and, eventually, obscurity. Instead, it was almost universally hailed as one of the finest albums ever recorded. So it should come as no great surprise that their fourth album, Kid A, is even more experimental, owing a debt to the studio-born soundscapes of Brian Eno, Aphex Twin and even later Talk Talk. Kid A is an album that would not sound out of place on the Warp Records roster, as keyboards, sequencers and electronic effects take the place of guitars on most tracks (particularly unusual for a band that boasts three guitarists). In fact, this is an album that succeeds without rock's bombast, from the looping keyboards of album opener "Everything In Its Right Place" to the bouncing, bass-led "The National Anthem" to the album's hauntingly atmospheric highlight, "Idioteque". Meanwhile, more traditional Radiohead tracks like "How To Disappear Completely" and "Optimistic" offer a natural bridge between the electronic noodlings of Kid A and the (slightly) more mainstream-sounding OK Computer. Radiohead may well be the most innovative popular band since the Beatles; as such, Kid A represents the most successful evolution of a major British act since Sgt Pepper's. --Robert Burrow

Customer Reviews

It is good.
I was in a dark back-street bar in St.Malo last month, and Kid A was playing. Man, and were those crazy French pseudo-intellectuals loving the avant-garde stylings of the 'Head?

Yes, they were. And so was I.

It suddenly dawned on me that Kid a ROCKS! and does not SUCK! as I heretofore believed. It's been on repeat on my mp3 machine since.

Loses a star for ripping off Aphex Twin a tiny bit too much

Classic Radiohead!
Best tracks: "How to Disappear Completely", "Everything in its Right Place", "Treefingers", "In Limbo", "Morning Bell"

Some people didn't like Kid A at all when it was first released. Some of those people who hated it grew to like it. Some turned their back on Radiohead forever. Some, like me, wondered what all the fuss was about. Not in terms of the quality of the record, which was terrific, but in terms of the way people were going on about how Radiohead wilfully made an uncommercial, horrible record that had no normal vocals or guitars, just a bunch of jazz noodling and dance beats, how they should have made another OK Computer or The Bends....for me, Kid A felt like the most natural progression from OK Computer imaginable. Listening to it, it felt right, it felt like this was where I was hoping the band would move onto and blimey, they actually did. Maybe I was at the right age where I wanted my favourite bands to challenge me. Why would we need another OK Computer? That album was perfect, time to move on. As for another album like The Bends, well....I was never a massive fan of that album anyway. Don't get me wrong, it IS a great work, with some astonishingly beautiful songs on it, but for me, it seemed too normal, and since Radiohead are so good at being strange, then I say bring on the weird.

Kid A is weird. Indeed, there are no conventional, untreated Thom Yorke vocals until the fourth song, and before we get there we get nursery rhymes turned inside out and upside down, full-on, all-out jazz rock explosions and an opening song which sounds like waking up from a dream....into another dream, and the dream is very odd indeed. This first song is called "Everything in Its Right Place", and it blew my mind the first time I heard it; it was the most unconventional song Radiohead had created up until then, what with its angular electronic rhythms and vocals that sound like they'd been processed through a vocoderised blender and then re-assembled, intentionally so, in the wrong order. The song builds to a powerful, chilling finale. The title track strips the honour of strangest Radiohead song right from its predecessor. "The National Anthem" then steals it for itself. Both of these songs are the ultimate litmus test for those who were willing to journey with Radiohead into their new sound. The latter is the noisiest, most raucous and undisciplined thing Radiohead have ever created; it's brilliant.

Interestingly, there were no singles released from Kid A, which seemed to me at the time like an extremely brave move for a band with such a high profile. It forced the listener to focus on the album as a whole, and indeed, the album is a beautifully cohesive work - as the opening song would say, everything is in its right place, yet at the same time, it's a wildly varied work, maintaining a sense of tone and atmosphere yet musically broader than anything the band had ever attempted. Even its most `normal' moments - like the ballad "How to Disappear Completely" or the almost radio-friendly "Optimistic" - are hued in huge waves of darkness in the case of the former and an offbeat, unusually murky mix in the case of the latter. Both songs are utterly brilliant, I hasten to add. "Optimistic" got singled out as the relative saving grace on Kid A for those who wanted another "Just" or "Paranoid Android", but I doubt this would have been much of a hit if it had been released as a single; despite the lovely vocals on the chorus, the production turns a potentially high-charting song into a thick slab of sound where drums, guitars and bass all co-exist within the same tight space. It all sounds great, but it's also a mess, a damn fine mess. Delightfully, there's also a totally unexpected, pretty funky jam right at the end. "How to Disappear Completely" is so astonishingly powerful it trembles this listener's very soul; the strings and vocals are so beautifully, chillingly delivered.

There's a piece called "Treefingers", which some might dismiss as an ambient throwaway, but for a long time was my favourite track on the album - it's a beauteous, hugely atmospheric wave of sound which feels like the most tranquil snapshot of the middle of the night imaginable, yet this tranquillity is underscored by something eerie at the core. For quite a while the very beat-heavy "Idioteque" was my least favourite thing on Kid A, yet it's grown on me and its heavily Aphex Twin-influenced percussion is quite hypnotic and claustrophobically spooky. More immediate favourites include the amazing, densely layered waves of guitar-fest that is "In Limbo", which manages to sound like its floating and falling at the same time. Also, there's "Morning Bell", which starts off as an innocuous/eerie lullaby before blossoming into a creepy catharsis of sound that could have gone on for ten more minutes and I wouldn't have minded. After all of this, it's nice to bow out on a beautiful, graceful note with "Motion Picture Soundtrack"; when it opens up into a glittering, sparkling thing of wonder near the end, the effect is quite magical.

In its own way, Kid A is as vital a Radiohead album as its two predecessors; many songs recorded during the sessions for this album would make it onto the less cohesive but still brilliant follow-up Amnesiac, which is also a must-listen.

EMPERORS NEW CLOTHES
A five star masterpiece? Somebody please, please, please, tell me why this CD isn't exactly what is sounds like, which is nothing more than good old Thom warbling his falsetto meaningless lyrics over aimless electronic noodling. It's drivel !!!!!