Radiohead
Kid A
Capitol

The lore has it (that is, I'm too lazy too look up the actual interview) that Radiohead, along with several other British bands, was asked by record executives what its gimmick was. Oasis said, "We're better than the Beatles." Blur said, "We're a mod band." Radiohead said, "We don't have a gimmick. It's all about the music." The group was summarily laughed out of the office. (Pulp and Supergrass apparently didn't show up at all given their poor promotion stateside.) Whether this story is apocryphal or not, it accurately reflects the band's philosophy and perhaps predicts the directions their music would take.

Listening to all the Radiohead albums in chronological order is like watching all of the Mad Max movies in a row. Little by little, the old familiar world breaks down and is eventually replaced by a new one. With each new album the band has experimented more and more with song stucture and texture. Pablo Honey was Pixies meets REM meets Hüsker Dü meets Neil Young. The Bends tightened up the songs and carved out a sound for the band. With OK Computer, Radiohead took that sound and started playing with electronic noises and weird time signatures. With Kid A, there is no verse-chorus-verse radio anthem material and there are hardly any guitar parts. "Idioteque" sounds a lot like Aphex Twin and most of the rest of it sounds like Brian Eno meets Sonic Youth. One of the tracks is an instrumental and some of the others might as well be with Thom Yorke's vocals distorted to the point of glossolalia.

That being said, this isn't really Radiohead goes electronic. Neither is it a "fuck you" album along the lines of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music or even Nirvana's In Utero. What Radiohead is trying to accomplish is what the Beatles and to a larger extent Pink Floyd did in the late '60s, which is to explore new areas for their music. After getting over the initial shock of the new sound and structure (or lack thereof) and listening to the album a couple of times, it becomes apparent that the quality control Radiohead has so judiciously exercised on previous albums has not been sacrificed here. The "songs" are still quite good and some of them are even catchy.

What's notable about this album is that Radiohead has done what the Fall, Joy Division, Wire, and Public Image, Ltd., did in the late '70s and early '80s — enrich the language of popular music. Unlike their post-punk analogues, Radiohead has found a larger audience for its noodlings and thus may have a greater impact on pop music at large. To be fair, Radiohead differs from these bands in a more significant way. That is to say, Yorke and Co. are not really doing anything no one has done before (Brian Eno in particular). But that misses the point of this album. Sure, others have experimented with song structure, sublimated their lyrics and incorporated electronic elements into their music, but none has done so with the grace and beauty that permeates every song on Kid A.

The major criticism of the album is that it's too short. It's easy to like what Radiohead is doing, but it's also easy to want more. Also, by making the vocal parts more a part of the mix (and less intelligible) than on previous albums, Radiohead has lost a lot of the emotional power that made The Bends so touching and OK Computer so alienating. No one will question that Dark Side of the Moon was great music, largely because of its experimentation, but it wouldn't have been the brilliant album it was without Roger Waters' lyrics. Still, with another album in the wings, Radiohead may yet stake its claim as the true inheritor (for better or worse) of the Floydian mantle.

— Nicholas Coleman (ncoleman@wesleyan.edu)