The Kid A poundup

Quickly. I oversold the IDM-ness of Kid A. I let “Idioteque” speak for the album as a whole (this is probably largely since when the album would come on at parties, it was when it reached this song that I knew for a fact that it was Radiohead. Up until then, it was just noise). This is nowhere near a “stripped-down” “post-rock” album or whatever the critics call it, considering songs like “Optimistic” are straight rock songs that borrow heavily from the Sonic Youth sound. You don’t hear “Candle” there? Strange.

In the comments for my last post on this album (and, coincidentally, the last post before this one, though I have a more Serious post started already), I said that I would probably find a few four star songs on Kid A and that maybe, over time, one or two of the four stars might jump to five stars.¹ I stand by that. Basically the album reeled in three stars. Some songs, like the title track and “Treefingers” make me claw out my eyes in boredom. Others, like the alienation anthem set off my alienated by whininess control systems. Often, I found myself simply waiting for tracks to get off the ground. “Optimistic” gets interesting about 15 seconds before ending. “Morning Bell” has potential as a sort of Air/Krautrock hybrid, and it sensed my need for it to get a little derailed, but its idea of derailed is pretty darn tame. Too bad.

Gold from 2000.

Two songs, though, did net four stars: the opening track and “The National Anthem.” “Everything in its Right Place” is simply a ballsy way to start an album. The listener pretty much falls into the song along a tiny avalanche, and that’s pretty disorienting. “The National Anthem,” on the other hand, seems to be a crowd favorite, so I don’t need to do the virtue extolling thing. Needless to say, the Mingus horns make it. If there were more tracks like that, I’d be more excited about the album.

In a funny twist of a postscript, and just so everyone knows where I’m coming from, two nights ago I decided to listen to another album from the same year, the delayed US release of Sarah Cracknell’s Lipslide. That album is all four- and five-star songs.

1. My starring system: 0 = unrated; 1 = something wrong with the mp3; 2 = this is a skit or some short thing that should never be on my portable music device; 3 = this is a song that is anywhere from unlistenable to ok; 4 = this song is pretty good, and I would like to hear it more often; 5 = I will seldom fast forward through this song. In case it’s not obvious, I use iTunes’s starring system both to rate songs and to pass case variables to conditional playlists, culminating in a playlist that’s 2/3 five-star songs and 1/3 four-star songs that is, simply put, always fun to listen to when bopping around the city. [↩]

Tags: air, idm, krautrock, mingus, poundup, radiohead, sarah cracknell, sonic youth