2021 - Radiohead - KID A MNESIA

2021 - Radiohead - KID A MNESIA @320

Riding high on their career-crowning post-rock masterpiece OK Computer, Radiohead could have gone anywhere. And they did. Partly in reaction to the depression, writer’s block and nausea that Thom Yorke experienced in the wake of huge critical and commercial acclaim, the Oxford quintet radically changed their writing methods and sound palette. Guitar-centric rock songs were out, replaced by avant-jazz mood pieces and electro-classical soundscapes. Melody was deconstructed, rhythms scrambled, vocals mangled and manipulated, lyrics spliced into cut-up collages. No longer seeking to emulate Scott Walker, Björk, Jeff Buckley and DJ Shadow, Radiohead were now aiming for a plateau beyond rock: to Aphex Twin and Arvo Pärt, Mingus and Messiaen, Can and Eno and Penderecki.

Repackaging sister albums Kid A and Amnesiac with an extra disc of alternate cuts and lost tracks, this boxset revisits the most divisive chapter in Radiohead’s career. Released in October 2000, Kid A certainly wrong-footed many reviewers: hipper gatekeeper critics deemed it derivative and self-congratulatory, while mainstream pundits found it impenetrable and wilfully obtuse. But two decades later, it mostly stands up as a boldly ambitious experiment for a major rock band, from the spiralling lounge-jazz incantation Everything In Its Right Place to the piledriving cyber-funk earworm Idioteque, the sumptuous orchestral ballad How To Disappear Completely and the gorgeous ambitronic reverie of Kid A itself. For all its challenging elements, the album became Radiohead’s first transatlantic chart-topper.

Recorded during the same sessions but released in May 2001, Amnesiac seemed at least partially designed to soothe more conservative Radiohead fans unsettled by Kid A. It certainly feels richer and broader overall, with more conventionally melodic, guitar-focused numbers like the swooping, circling Knives Out and the luminous torch song You And Whose Army, on which Yorke takes veiled potshots at Tony Blair in a plaintive Chet Baker falsetto. There is even an inspired guest appearance by veteran jazz icon Humphrey Lyttleton and his band, who clothe Yorke’s paranoid anti-fame ballad Life In A Glasshouse in bluesy, woozy, half-drunk swirls of New Orleans brass. (Uncut)

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