The Year: 2000The Album: Radiohead, Kid A
Who It Influenced: Bloc Party, the Twilight Sad, the Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Cold War Kids, TV on the Radio
I'd never cracked out my 'secret' Kid A CD booklet before today. Maybe that disqualifies me as some sort of Radiohead obsessive, desperate to drink in every single element of this landmark album upon its 2000 release. After all, given the way every spin of the disc revealed some new hidden detail, what could be revealed by lifting up the CD tray, and discovering what wonders lay beneath?
The wonders of the actual album have long been enough. Upon its release, Kid A was categorized as a radical left turn for a band that had been, up until that point, groomed to fill U2's shoes; a successor to the crown of the world's biggest rockband. On their fourth album, Radiohead were no longer a rockband; putting away the clichés and exploring an internal sound-world of ripple and hue, of texture and atmosphere.
For a whole decade now, I've flipped not through the bonus book of art, but marveled at the album's title track. Though few would summon 'beauty' in describing it, I've always heard something intensely beautiful in it; much more so than any of the earnest ballads (like the godawful "High and Dry") that many would summon as Radiohead's contribution to the artistic canon of beauty.
Yet hearing Thom Yorke's sinuous, stretched out, into a sinister, slippery, pitch-rupturing locus of digital manipulation, his every line comes across as, strangely, impossibly tender. Singing a hymn to the first cloned child, from its 'father's' perspective, Yorke turns it into a digital hymnal sung by a super-computer, a fragile lullaby steeped in the love of a tender motherboard.
- Full review: Radiohead, Kid A
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