The Inside Connection 10.2000
Radiohead and their New Kid A
Breaking Away From their Past
by Gabriella
Thom Yorke (vocals), Jonny Greenwood (guitar, keyboards, xylophone) Ed O'Brien (guitar), Colin Greenwood (bass) and Phil Selway (drums) began playing together in 1987 in Oxford. With their new album, Kid A, it seems that Radiohead said goodbye to everything that made them so popular in the past. Instead of melodies it sounds more like an art project, a mood-invoking avant-garde piece of work, as if they were overdosing on Can and Kraftwerk. Colin Greenwood agrees. “It's true, Can and Kraftwerk were the bands we’ve been listening to a lot, but also Charlie Mingus,” he says. “We wanted to show some new angles in our work. It felt a bit like we were in a dead-end street and that was really frustrating.” Their shy frontman, Thom Yorke, claims that after the enormous success of OK Computer, he felt like he was in a creative prison and tried to break out with this album.
To avoid once again being labeled "guitar pop," they experimented with their fourth studio album, using an Apple Notebook and a vocorder program to get some weird sound effects. "Thom sang through the Notebook and at the same time Jonny’s keyboard was hooked up. We made all sorts of weird experiments, a little bit like the Beastie Boys maybe. They also tried a lot of new and sometimes weird sound effects. It was a very creative, relaxed atmosphere and we really enjoyed working together."
Even Yorke confessed he enjoyed it. "We didn’t have to push ourselves to work. We wanted to get things done, to experiment and find new angles, leave the old paths. We tried to treat the album like a song, let the album develop itself rather than giving it a shape and molding it into a shape, and it worked. It was a completely different way we used for work and it was rather liberating. We had about 40 songs but only a few made it; only a few of them were what we wanted on the album. We toyed with the idea of making it a double album, but I think that would only have confused everybody even more, so we decided to stick with the songs we picked."
The opening cut, "Everything In Its Right Place," continues Radiohead’s evolution of a distant, haunting sound that first appeared on OK Computer in 1997. With just keyboard and vocals, the song goes from stark to swirling when some added effects blend the sound. But the title is a bit misleading: nothing in "Everything In Its Right Place" seems to be in the right place, and it leaves you slightly confused.
The second cut, the title track, offers more of the same free-falling, space-jam, groundless sounds. It’s here that the CD starts to abandon the traditional, blues-based, rock and pop construction of songs, providing a sense of the future. Colin Greenwood is enthusiastic about the beginning of the song. "The way Thom sings those first few lines about Kid A, that's such an excellent opening for the whole album. It really shows you were we're going and what is happening in the album."
While the languid and melodic "How To Disappear Completely" might have fit nicely on OK Computer, the rest of the songs on Kid A don’t fit into the line of classic rock thrillers we're used to from Radiohead. The whole album has a rather strange and slightly scary feel to it. It’s cryptic and yet tuneful, but something is still amiss and one cannot help wondering if Yorke should not be on Prozac, so depressive and scary sound the lyrics and the music together. The lyrics seem to be angst-ridden and a tad darker than just gray, but brothers Colin and Jonny Greenwood claim that there is no reason to be scared for Thom’s mental health.
"Thom isn’t half as moody and unstable as his lyrics can make you believe he is. I think a lot of people take the lyrics too seriously and read too much into it. They only show a part of Thom’s personality, maybe the dark part, but it is still not the whole guy. He used his voice like an instrument and we used the lyrics like pieces in a collage, pierced something together and created an artwork out of a lot of different little things. There is no point in taking the lyrics alone; that’s one of the reasons why we won’t have a lyric sheet with the album."
There is also another reason, but it takes Colin a while to voice what Thom apparently told the band a few times. "Thom is really fed up with being the spokesperson of a lost generation until all eternity, with all their fear, angst, loneliness and post-millennium neurosis. He’s trying to escape that fate by moving, always moving forward, never standing still, always developing."
The CD somehow has the feel of a rather morbid soundtrack, a concept-heavy album that is at times breathtakingly lovely, and at times maddeningly disharmonic and plainly strange. It seems more admirable than likable, filled with long, bleep- and loop-heavy instrumental suites, harmonic and atmospheric songs that are lovely but simply seem to go nowhere. Its 10 songs somehow do fit together, but more in the sense of a concept than an album. Of course, it is a great piece of work; after all, the members of Radiohead are geniuses, but I can’t help wondering if they haven’t started to take their status as geniuses a bit too seriously.
Because of the tortured feeling you get from the album, the question arises if it was planned this way or if it was all just by chance. Yorke claims that it was all just happening somehow. "I think it was the first time we didn’t have a clue what we were going to do, what we were doing. We were just experimenting. We’ve been in this state for about a year, just fooling around, trying out stuff and listening to what we did, then it finally started to get into shape ... after about 18 months."
He also comes up with a rather interesting metaphor for his songs. "The track listing is always the hardest part for me; it is so difficult and almost painful. I can only use the old metaphor about songs being like children. My songs are my kids. Some of them stay with me, some others I have to send out, out to the war. It might sound stupid and it might even sound naive, but that’s just the way it is. I talked to Bjork about it and she agrees, she says she feels exactly the same way about her songs."
Compared to their other albums, OK Computer (1997), Bends (1995) and Pablo Honey (1993), I can’t help but miss the inspired, alternative rock band of the past, and I feel a bit lost with the slightly lifeless homage to artistic abstraction. While brilliant, it certainly is lacking accessibility and a spark of humanity. While all their previous work seemed to be alive and sparkling, Kid A sparkles with a machine-like glow that seems cold.
Breaking Away From their Past
by Gabriella
Thom Yorke (vocals), Jonny Greenwood (guitar, keyboards, xylophone) Ed O'Brien (guitar), Colin Greenwood (bass) and Phil Selway (drums) began playing together in 1987 in Oxford. With their new album, Kid A, it seems that Radiohead said goodbye to everything that made them so popular in the past. Instead of melodies it sounds more like an art project, a mood-invoking avant-garde piece of work, as if they were overdosing on Can and Kraftwerk. Colin Greenwood agrees. “It's true, Can and Kraftwerk were the bands we’ve been listening to a lot, but also Charlie Mingus,” he says. “We wanted to show some new angles in our work. It felt a bit like we were in a dead-end street and that was really frustrating.” Their shy frontman, Thom Yorke, claims that after the enormous success of OK Computer, he felt like he was in a creative prison and tried to break out with this album.
To avoid once again being labeled "guitar pop," they experimented with their fourth studio album, using an Apple Notebook and a vocorder program to get some weird sound effects. "Thom sang through the Notebook and at the same time Jonny’s keyboard was hooked up. We made all sorts of weird experiments, a little bit like the Beastie Boys maybe. They also tried a lot of new and sometimes weird sound effects. It was a very creative, relaxed atmosphere and we really enjoyed working together."
Even Yorke confessed he enjoyed it. "We didn’t have to push ourselves to work. We wanted to get things done, to experiment and find new angles, leave the old paths. We tried to treat the album like a song, let the album develop itself rather than giving it a shape and molding it into a shape, and it worked. It was a completely different way we used for work and it was rather liberating. We had about 40 songs but only a few made it; only a few of them were what we wanted on the album. We toyed with the idea of making it a double album, but I think that would only have confused everybody even more, so we decided to stick with the songs we picked."
The opening cut, "Everything In Its Right Place," continues Radiohead’s evolution of a distant, haunting sound that first appeared on OK Computer in 1997. With just keyboard and vocals, the song goes from stark to swirling when some added effects blend the sound. But the title is a bit misleading: nothing in "Everything In Its Right Place" seems to be in the right place, and it leaves you slightly confused.
The second cut, the title track, offers more of the same free-falling, space-jam, groundless sounds. It’s here that the CD starts to abandon the traditional, blues-based, rock and pop construction of songs, providing a sense of the future. Colin Greenwood is enthusiastic about the beginning of the song. "The way Thom sings those first few lines about Kid A, that's such an excellent opening for the whole album. It really shows you were we're going and what is happening in the album."
While the languid and melodic "How To Disappear Completely" might have fit nicely on OK Computer, the rest of the songs on Kid A don’t fit into the line of classic rock thrillers we're used to from Radiohead. The whole album has a rather strange and slightly scary feel to it. It’s cryptic and yet tuneful, but something is still amiss and one cannot help wondering if Yorke should not be on Prozac, so depressive and scary sound the lyrics and the music together. The lyrics seem to be angst-ridden and a tad darker than just gray, but brothers Colin and Jonny Greenwood claim that there is no reason to be scared for Thom’s mental health.
"Thom isn’t half as moody and unstable as his lyrics can make you believe he is. I think a lot of people take the lyrics too seriously and read too much into it. They only show a part of Thom’s personality, maybe the dark part, but it is still not the whole guy. He used his voice like an instrument and we used the lyrics like pieces in a collage, pierced something together and created an artwork out of a lot of different little things. There is no point in taking the lyrics alone; that’s one of the reasons why we won’t have a lyric sheet with the album."
There is also another reason, but it takes Colin a while to voice what Thom apparently told the band a few times. "Thom is really fed up with being the spokesperson of a lost generation until all eternity, with all their fear, angst, loneliness and post-millennium neurosis. He’s trying to escape that fate by moving, always moving forward, never standing still, always developing."
The CD somehow has the feel of a rather morbid soundtrack, a concept-heavy album that is at times breathtakingly lovely, and at times maddeningly disharmonic and plainly strange. It seems more admirable than likable, filled with long, bleep- and loop-heavy instrumental suites, harmonic and atmospheric songs that are lovely but simply seem to go nowhere. Its 10 songs somehow do fit together, but more in the sense of a concept than an album. Of course, it is a great piece of work; after all, the members of Radiohead are geniuses, but I can’t help wondering if they haven’t started to take their status as geniuses a bit too seriously.
Because of the tortured feeling you get from the album, the question arises if it was planned this way or if it was all just by chance. Yorke claims that it was all just happening somehow. "I think it was the first time we didn’t have a clue what we were going to do, what we were doing. We were just experimenting. We’ve been in this state for about a year, just fooling around, trying out stuff and listening to what we did, then it finally started to get into shape ... after about 18 months."
He also comes up with a rather interesting metaphor for his songs. "The track listing is always the hardest part for me; it is so difficult and almost painful. I can only use the old metaphor about songs being like children. My songs are my kids. Some of them stay with me, some others I have to send out, out to the war. It might sound stupid and it might even sound naive, but that’s just the way it is. I talked to Bjork about it and she agrees, she says she feels exactly the same way about her songs."
Compared to their other albums, OK Computer (1997), Bends (1995) and Pablo Honey (1993), I can’t help but miss the inspired, alternative rock band of the past, and I feel a bit lost with the slightly lifeless homage to artistic abstraction. While brilliant, it certainly is lacking accessibility and a spark of humanity. While all their previous work seemed to be alive and sparkling, Kid A sparkles with a machine-like glow that seems cold.
Labels: Colin Greenwood, Jonny Greenwood, Kid A, Radiohead, Thom Yorke
Radiohead’s bass player has been interviewed endlessly. One added weekly.
<< Home