I'm in a good mood here because I just warmed up with Daft Punk's "Human After All". "Discovery" was a better EP, but the new album is a better LP. There's nothing as glorious as "Digital Love" or "One More Time", but back-to-front, it's a stronger (albeit more stoic and mechanical) album, with a second half that doesn't bore me to death. Give me the likes of "One More Time" on a CD single, but that POPOPOPOP approach failed over an LP's length -- if I'm going to listen to fifty minutes of Daft Punk, then I want my face pounded in with lots of "Da Funk"-y beats.
Now I'm listening to Kate Bush's "Hounds of Love", which seems appropriate because Kate, like Radiohead would do fifteen years later, challenged her fan base by throwing a bunch of abstract mood pieces and ambient noises at them in lieu of what they were used to hearing from her.
On this blog, I think I've already mentioned my "Second Opinion" pieces (which were written in old notebooks, mainly in the pre-blog days). They were reviews of albums that I hadn't heard in many years (e.g. Fine Young Cannibals' "The Raw and the Cooked") or albums that I had somehow never gotten around to hearing in full despite being very familiar with the band and many of their famous songs (e.g. The Beloved's "Happiness"). [note: Magnetic Fields' "Get Lost" didn't fit that bill, because I became acquainted with the songs quite recently]
"Kid A" is by far the most recent album that I've covered in this fashion. My "rules" are fairly simple -- I listen to the album straight through and write my comments in real time (although short pauses to play catch-up are fairly typical). Since I'm already familiar with the band (and in certain cases, the songs on the album as well), then I'm usually not stuck for things to write, so this "real time first impression" format tends to work. Clearly, I aim to go into these with an open mind and write as honestly as possible. Since there isn't any time to re-listen or re-evaluate while writing, the honesty policy also tends to succeed. So of course, as I write this introduction, I have yet to hear the album.
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I would normally start the review with an extended introduction about what the band meant/means to me, but in the case of me + Radiohead, little more needs to be said. To be brief: I haven't heard this album in over three years. Every time I tried to give it a chance, I was bored silly. I liked "The Bends" and enjoyed the singles on "OK Computer", but everything else on that album bored me to death. Now here they came with an album of "electronica" (three years after "electronica" was declared the Next Big Thing), busily name-dropping Aphex Twin and the rest of the Warp records posse, thereby impressing everyone who hadn't been listening to that label for the previous five or ten years. All right, so here we go ... !!!!
1. Everything In Its Right Place. This is a good start, but then again, this is the only song I remember liking on this album. As I recall thinking at the time, this is mainly because Thom Yorke sings an actual melody instead of just singing for the sake of hearing his own whining. Sorry, I'm supposed to be more open minded. If this song were released today, they'd get Fennesz to remix it and build it up proper. The noisy, gorgeous mess would drown out Yorke completely, making a good song even better.
2. Kid A. Hey, Autechre's "LP 5" was a great album, wasn't it? Radiohead certainly think so. Now let's throw in some beats, just for the hell of it. And sing something unintelligible while tweaking the levels on some filters, just because the knobs are there. Next.
3. The National Anthem. A bass/drums rhythm is a welcome change from the last five minutes of noodling, laying down a groove that wouldn't be out of place on an early Verve record. If this was my track, I'd lock onto this groove with an atomic clock and slide whooshy soundscapes continually in and out of the mix, not unlike the Peel Session that Stereolab recorded with Sonic Boom. Which is exactly what happens for the first minute or so, only to give way to a mixture of bad ("wow, I wonder what it will sound like if I feed my voice through this vocoder-like effect") and good (free jazz squawks and rapidly developing chaos while the groove plows full speed ahead).
4. How To Disappear Completely. Easily the most "OK Computer"-esque track thus far, but it's "album track" quality, not "single quality", which is to say, it's seriously lacking in quality. I think there's a fine little ballad lurking beneath all the knob twiddling. Obviously, this would have been a simple, "High and Dry"-like guitar ballad on any of Radiohead's other albums to this point, but since this is "Kid A", they felt compelled to drown it in spooky noises and rumbling strings. This is the equivalent of a melisma-obsessed R&B singer turning the word "love" into a 38-syllable word instead of just singing the one note written on the page.
5. Treefingers. Finally, a song on the album that I wouldn't change. It sounds like they did their homework and paid attention to "Selected Ambient Works II" and all those Eno albums. Very pleasant, in large part because it was just *there*, like all the best ambient music, and they didn't try to clutter it with new melodies halfway through, or vocals, or whatnot.
6. Optimistic. Now they're back to doing a more conventional rock song. I guess they wanted to leave themselves something to play live without having to make major adjustments to the studio recording. Unlike "How To Disappear Completely", they didn't clutter it for the sake of being a bit more experimental. The track didn't do much for me, but "OK Computer" fans would probably like it.
7. In Limbo ... is an aptly named song, as the gentle guitar melody seems to drift along from bar to bar. It's a lo-fi, spacey arrangement, and could probably be mistaken for something recorded on a humid day at dusk in someone's garage. This might be a good time to mention that I can't recall a single melody from any earlier track on this album, save "Everything In Its Right Place". I can remember the general feel of "The National Anthem" (loved the groove) and "Treefingers" (ambient tranquility), but otherwise, I remember hardly anything without looking at my notes. Why those tracks? I have an idea as to why; I think I'll save it until the album is over.
8. Idioteque. AFAIK, this is considered by many to be the standout track on the album. Musically, how could it not be? It's essentially lifted straight from Autechre's "Anvil Vapre", and you won't catch me saying a bad word about that. Unfortunately, I can't stand Thom Yorke's blasted falsetto, which to my ears, is completely out of place with the harder-edged feel of the music. Hang on, so the singer in an indie guitar band decides to sing on top of a generic "I Can't Believe It's Not Autechre" track, and suddenly his band gets credited with joining indie and IDM at the hip? Fuck this shit.
9. Morning Bell. Oh Jesus, now they're scavenging from Tortoise. At least they did a good job of it -- this song stands up to anything on "Millions Now Living Will Never Die".
10. Motion Picture Soundtrack. OK, I wasn't expecting the harps. I could talk about how that organ is reminding me of The Cure's "Untitled" (another final track that's a bit out of step with the album that preceded it), but let's get to the point. "Kid A" desperately wants to be an all-instrumental album of abstract IDM. If they'd stuck to that simple, streamlined goal, then this album would be a passable Autechre clone, indistinguishable from all the other Autechre clones. When they stuck to doing one thing, like the basic ambience of "Treefingers", or one straightforward, unidirectional concept like the "let's loop this nice melody over and over while piling some noise on top" of "Everything In Its Right Place", then the album succeeds. Now that the album has finished playing, those sorts of moments are the ones I remember (re: comments at the end of "In Limbo"). But the more complex arrangements smack of boys playing with their fun and complicated toys, pausing every thirty seconds to unnecessarily toss in a guitar or a bland vocal melody in the name of indie rock. And even THAT wouldn't be so bad if all the sounds on the album weren't so darned derivative of electronic artists who had been making superior-sounding material for the previous decade or even more.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to reset myself by listening to Warp's "Artificial Intelligence Vol. 1".
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