Future Shock: 'Kid A'

On Tuesday Radiohead released Kid A, the followup to their much-acclaimed 1997 album, OK Computer. Frontman Thom Yorke told a recent web audience that Kid A is a reference to "the first human clone-I bet it has already happened."

Although Kid A is indeed a testament to the triumphs and pitfalls of ever-changing, ever-challenging human/technology symbioses, it is also an autobiographical benchmark on Radiohead's evolutionary path. 1993's Pablo Honey saw the Oxfordians feel their way through the essence of being a so-called alternative band in a glut of Seattleites. Zeitgeist-capturing grunge-guitar riffs, perennial themes of love and loss, and charmingly obtuse self-loathing (remember "Creep?") earmarked the band for their potential in the mainstream music scene, and, more importantly, heralded the band's existence as a self-aware musical entity.

Radiohead's sophomore release, the 1995 album The Bends, left previously skeptical critics pleasantly surprised. Having graduated from the mere thrills of self-aware existence and loud guitars, Radiohead used The Bends to explore themes of suburban ennui through subtler means. Chilling ballads and tortured rock songs backed with acoustic and electric instruments proved Yorke and the boys to be prolific musicians, while the album's commercial success established Radiohead as one of the most creative and experimental mainstream bands of the mid-nineties, not applicable to the Blur-vs.-Oasis Battle of the Brit Bands. "High and Dry," "Just" and "Fake Plastic Trees" (immortalized in Clueless as Cher makes that "whiny college radio song" remark and shuts off the stereo) became instant radio (and MTV) hits.

The praise heaped upon 1997's OK Computer reached the asymptotic limit. No longer bored with pedestrian first-world existence, Radiohead's third album conveyed disgust with the selfish misuse of technology for self-improvement. Lucid lullabies ("Airbag," "No Surprises"), Kafkaesque visions ("Paranoid Android"), obligatory condemnatory ballads ("Karma Police," "Lucky") and a pleasingly incongruous-yet-wicked-good rock song ("Electioneering") assembled a musical line-up so good that one instantly forgave the band for the tiresome poem "Fitter Happier" occupying the seventh track of the album. The unanimous acclaim OK Computer received and subsequent appearance on every music magazine's "Top 10 albums of the Year" lists (as well as on countless top-10-albums-of-all-time lists) left music-lovers and critics alike standing over Radiohead's ashes and wondering what their fourth release would bring.

On the surface Kid A, with its strong move towards using electronic sounds rather than guitars, offers a bleak vision for a new world order. The technology created to make us "fitter, happier" and "more productive" in OK Computer can now manipulate human beings at its electronic will. However, interspersed throughout the album are electronic baby babble and lullaby-like fragments-poignant moments that reminds the listener that the Kid A of the album's title, although a triumph of technology, is still a human being-an element of hope that has been lacking in Radiohead's previous releases. The struggle in the album reaches an ambiguous end in a setting where nothing is as it seems.

A case in point is the first track, "Everything in its Right Place," which, contrary to what the title suggests, is a gentle-sounding, amorphous mass of pipe-organ, electronic speech manipulation and heartbeat-like pulse pierced by Thom Yorke's familiar wail.

"National Anthem" is like Ravel's "La Valse" for the next century-musical layers of bass, drum, piano, strings, and big band horns float in one by one past Thom Yorke's flattened, metallic voice and reach a furious point before the inevitable debacle.

The fourth song, "How to Disappear Completely," is a beautiful ballad in the tradition of OK Computer's "Lucky" and The Bends' "Fake Plastic Trees." The minimalist lyrics and instrumentation are in concert with the song's theme of invisibility. However, there is still the rare indulgence; a gorgeous and unexpected melisma on "Strobe Lights" sets the song apart from its predecessors.

"Optimistic" oscillates between hope and despair within an unwavering rhythmic framework, the lyrics "You can try the best you can/The best you can is good enough/" counterbalanced by "This one's optimistic/This one went to market/This one just came out of the swamp/This one drops a payload/Fodder for the animals/Living on Animal Farm" and rounded off by an unexpected jazzy cadence which leads into the next song, "In Limbo," without warning.

At first listen, "Idioteque" is easily the most bizarre song on the album. A comment on one Radiohead website called the track "a blatantly stupid attempt at making a cheesy dance song." The song, however, is intensely aware of its own artificiality, as given in the title. The lyrics make repeated references to "bunkers," and the counterpoint of Thom Yorke's bare voice against the drum machine conjures images of confinement.

Although extraordinarily clever as conceptual art and an enjoyable listen, Kid A, as one would expect from a clone, is not particularly striking in its musical originality. Peter Frampton was experimenting with electronic voice manipulation when my parents were still in college, the synthesized matrix in the album's title track resembles devices Bjork has been employing since Post, "Optimistic" could easily be mistaken for an R.E.M. tune and "Morning Bell" sounds like a track cut from Portishead's Dummy.

The power struggle between man and machine is abandoned without a winner, and Kid A ends with a vivid human vignette. "Motion Picture Soundtrack," whose lyrics, "Red wine and sleeping pills/Help me get back to your arms/Cheap sex and sad films/Help me get back where I belong," set against an unlikely progression of plagal cadences on organ and starry harp glissandos, ends with the line, "I will see you in the next life."

Radiohead's next life should indeed be something to look out for. B+0

Radiohead

Kid A

Capitol

Kid A

Capitol