Twin Peaks
Together at last: the two spooky volumes of Radiohead’s arena rock renunciation, 2000-2001, plus extras. Danny Eccleston logs on.
Radiohead ★★★★★ Kid A Mnesia
XL. CD/DL/LP
THE CHORUS of dismay that greeted Radiohead’s Kid A on release in 2000 seems passing strange now its hybrid of electronic and traditional rock aesthetics is so ubiquitous. But at the time it offended two camps: those invested in the band’s soaring anthems, and electronica aficionados irked by rock stars encroaching clumsily on their niche. And there was another problem for those who had seen Radiohead live earlier in the year: the most affecting and immediate new songs they were playing weren’t on it. Fans were confronted with the ghostly glitching groove of Everything In Its Right Place and many were left scratching their heads.
Twenty years on, Everything… is now one of Radiohead’s most popular live bangers and we know that those lost songs from 2000 weren’t lost for long – destined, in fact, for 2001’s Kid A companion Amnesiac. Back then, with the more organic-sounding Pyramid Song, Knives Out and You And Whose Army? in pride of place – the first-named easily in the Top 5 of all Radiohead songs – Amnesiac felt like a corrective of sorts, with its slower ‘acoustic’ version of Morning Bell (contrasting with Kid A’s original, with its skittery, d’n’b-ish beats, in 5/4) arguably emblematic. But it also housed more radical gambits even than Kid A: the neurotic gamelan of opener Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box; the nightmare labyrinth of Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors; the fritzing hard-disk ultra-melancholy of Like Spinning Plates…
Like all double albums (even one whose halves emerged months apart) Kid A/Amnesiac encouraged efforts to tracklist the perfect single disc, but as with all double albums, everyone’s distillation was different. Smooshed together on this anniversary package, it’s hard to put a cigarette paper between the two, or decide what’s superfluous. Even their least lauded tracks – Kid A’s folky In Limbo or Eno-ish Treefingers; Amnesiac’s electric guitar étude, Hunting Bears – play vital roles, moments of lull amid the emotional intensity. Meanwhile, the furore over Radiohead’s digital transformation masked another, more analogue innovation: the flowering of guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s orchestrations. Defiantly modern but profoundly beautiful, his strings are the source of Pyramid Song’s bewitching depth and, from Kid A, How To Disappear Completely’s whirlpool of despair. You can enjoy the isolated string parts of both on Kid A Mnesia’s bonus disc, along with a previously unreleased If You Say The Word – a rich and velvety slice of alt-lounge rock, too rich, it seems, for the austerity of Radiohead’s vibe of 2000/01 – and a solo acoustic guitar rendering of Follow Me Around which finds a desperate Thom Yorke chased by an undead swarm of “Thatcher’s children” in a rare outbreak of unambiguous polemic (in live versions at the turn of the last century, Yorke was heard to sing “Did you lie to us Tony? We thought you were different”).
While OK Computer had proved inimitable – at once too grand and splenetic, perhaps too virtuosic, aspects exemplified all at once by Paranoid Android – Kid A and Amnesiac lit a path. If the musicians in Hot Chip, Animal Collective, MGMT and more had already envisioned a boundary-blind mélange of indie rock and electronica, then here at the very least was moral support. Purer electronica artists, too, saw the value in what Radiohead were contributing. Listen to James Holden’s The Inheritors on this month’s MOJO CD and hear his acknowledgment of Yorke and co’s unique processing of his genre’s pioneers, of Cluster and Boards Of Canada.
“I’d completely had it with melody,” said Yorke in explanation of Radiohead’s direction after OK Computer. “All melodies to me were pure embarrassment.” But his renunciation was relative. Both these albums twisted machines to Radiohead’s will, to their need to hear soulful songs singing in their wires. And they’re resonating still.