Radiohead
Kid A

THE REVIEW

After an album like “Ok Computer,” it's hard to improve; listening to “Kid A” makes it clear that Thom Yorke felt the same way. The first notes of Radiohead in the new millennium are those of the synthetic piano that paints “Everything In Its Right Place,” something formally very distant from previous works even though the mood remains the same depressed and psychotic as before.

It's difficult to evaluate an album like this; one risks praising the band just for changing style, but this is not a positive fact in itself, merely a decision, a change of course that can lead to positive or negative outcomes.

At first glance, the use of electronics seems to impoverish the band's sound; there's a sense of missing Yorke's voice, which has always been fundamental in the economy of the five. Songs like the opening one or the subsequent title track are hard to digest. Difficult because they resemble mutilated bodies, defaced sculptures. The listening flounders, strangled by an almost unbearable psychotic intensity. There is a certain mania in the compositions, an obsession that hovers in the air and carves a state of the soul more than a sound concept. And it is precisely because of this that the work elevates itself very high. “Everything In Its Right Place” is the beginning; a horror vacui that tears the mind; the repetitiveness of the singing, the synthetic sounds violently embroidering the clear initial fabric and the emotional climax merge into something subtle, invasive, and disheartening. We are at incredible expressive levels; we are faced with a sort of emotional collage; a sort of frantic search for something that does not exist. “Everything In Its Right Place.”

The strength of this work does not lie in experimentation, in musical sophistication, but in the poignant intensity and communication that Radiohead manages to create with electronic sounds. “Kid A” is the proof; a childlike music box, a dense intertwining of simple motifs that form a theater of the absurd, so subliminal that it remains veiled in an aura of mystery.
What convinces even more that the value of the album does not lie in simple electronics is demonstrated by tracks like “The National Anthem”, “How To Disappear Completely”, and “Optimistic”, original but not so electronic.
The first is a drunken hymn to madness; a powerful bass line, an exhausting rhythm, and a crowding of icy echoes. The atypical structure of the track does not hide its greater accessibility compared to the first two; we are far from simple electronics or rock. We are in a no man's land dominated by the subconscious. In the end, the real purpose of “Kid A” is to give a voice to what does not have one, to show the hidden soul of each of us. We are facing the Radiohead alter ego. The noisy, splendidly annoying finale is the apotheosis of this movement. The antithesis of everything the band had been up to that point.

It is clear at this point that the change of course is not a mere whim, but a coherent and well-articulated choice.

To confirm that the group wants to take us “to the dark side of the moon,” there is the splendid ballad “How To Disappear Completely”, a painful leap out of space and time. The manifesto of the work's philosophy is “I’m Not Here, This Isn’t Happening”.
After the pause of “Treefingers”, the splendid “Optimistic” awaits us, much less cryptic than the other songs, it is a fascinating rock sculpted in the wind, a revisitation of the Radiohead of the past, seen from an almost opposite perspective.
The most extreme moment is perhaps represented by “In Limbo”, a sort of off-key dance, deliberately disjointed, confirming how the group always seeks what is not congenial to it. The final triptych is the most experimental; the glacial dance of “Idioteque”, a delightful digression from the sound of the album, is one of the most charismatic songs, also thanks to Yorke’s excellent vocal performance. “Morning Bell” is another episode of ego denial, a continuous chase after the wind; the tracks on this album take shape from nothing, they are impromptu sculptures, aimed at describing a mood more than achieving a formal perfection, which is regularly and deliberately lacking.

The melancholic ending is entrusted to the enchanting strings of “Motion Picture Soundtrack”, a splendid conclusion for an ambitious, difficult, and beautiful album.

It is clear that “Kid A” is not just a splendid act of renewal and revolt; what we witness is a constant search for the indefinite, the denial of all certainty. These ten songs attempt to give sound to the soul, to what hides behind appearances.

I can't say if they succeeded or not, but the mere attempt deserves eternity.