Still from Radiohead’s “I Might Be Wrong” music video
Chris Forrester extracts what makes Radiohead’s albums Kid A and Amnesiac — which are the score to a recent rerelease of 1922’s Nosferatu — such enigmatic and rewarding works.
“I had never even seen a shooting star before… I looked up. I thought it was fireworks. A teardrop of fire shot from space and disappeared behind the church where the syrupy River Arno crawled. Radiohead had the heavens on their side.” — Brent DiCrescenzo, in a 2000 review of Radiohead’s Kid A for Pitchfork
I used to think it was hyperbolic, beginning a review that way. Invoking the heavens, conjuring such a vivid scene, suggesting that the album to which you’ve ascribed that rare perfect score transcends the silly confines of good and bad and blazes through a stratosphere of instant pantheon records like, say, The Cure’s Disintegration, Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, or Radiohead’s own OK Computer… what hyperbole for an album that’s not even their best! But these days, I’m not so sure.
In January 1999, a few months after concluding the tour for their previous album — the star-making OK Computer, whose lofty hype and near-instant canonization drove them into the pits of depression — Radiohead converted a barn in Oxfordshire, England into a recording studio, and embarked on a writing process that nearly broke them up. The result was Kid A, a barren wasteland of an album whose spare lyricism and alien sounds still feel like visions of a horrifying near-future nearly three decades later, and the following year Amnesiac, a second record completed from the same recording sessions. Initially conceived as a double album, but released separately for fear of that gesture’s implicit desperation (and, one imagines, to flaunt the sheer standalone magnitude of each set of songs), Kid A and Amnesiac feel like a pair of conjoined twins separated at birth, raised in different environments, and yet still recognizably halves of the same depressive soul.
Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke in Meeting People is Easy
Thoroughly alienated by the experience of OK Computer and its ensuing tour’s success, the band’s entire approach to their follow-up seems to have been to shake off everything about their sound that had gotten them to that point, and in doing so channels all the frigid angst of going from up-and-coming artists to global commodities overnight. That transformation is captured in all its grainy, gloomy glory in Meeting People is Easy (Gee, 1998), an on-the-road documentary about the band’s promotion and touring of OK Computer that ends up more significantly a chronicling of artists leeched of their humanity by the machine of commercialization. That a number of sequences are set to tracks from the album only underscores just how thoroughly they’d been subjected to the very dystopia now they’d been singing about.
And so, on Kid A and Amnesiac, gone are the soft rockers whose swooning heartbreak anthem “Fake Plastic Trees” proved them more than one-hit-wonders, the depressive avatars of a worn-out generation whose “No Surprises” a crass newscaster called “music to cut your wrists to,” and even the often comfortably narrative songwriting of earlier albums. Even the most abstract of frontman Thom Yorke’s ’90s songwriting (the gorgeous, double-tracked “a chemical reaction, hysterical and useless” bridge of “Let Down” or the “Rows of houses, all bearing down on me/I can feel their blue hands touching me” of “Street Spirit [Fade Out]”) pales in comparison to the spare, gestural lyricism of Kid A; the “fireworks and hurricanes” of “How to Disappear Completely,” the “nervous messed-up marionette/floating ‘round on a prison ship” of “Optimistic,” or the manic, repeated “cut the kids in half” of “Morning Bell.” And that’s to say nothing of the songs’ sounds and structures — the barren, pseudo-ambient electronic sound of “Everything in Its Right Place” and “Kid A,” the former sliding into the latter as if to plant the album’s flag firmly in “fuck you, we do what we want” territory sonically; the frantic, free jazz explosion that culminates “The National Anthem;” the jagged, blown-out beats and glassy Paul Lansky sample of “Idioteque” — all of which ferociously eschew anything that might have come to be synonymous with Radiohead. The first hint of anything you might confuse with warmth doesn’t come until the mournful, breathy organ that backdrops Yorke’s heartbroken lamentations on album closer “Motion Picture Soundtrack.”
If Kid A sounds like a premonition of coming horrors, then Amnesiac feels like their half-remembered aftermath, where “black-eyed angels swam at me” (the mournful, haunted “Pyramid Song”), people are “hungry for a lynching” (big band-inflected closer “Life in a Glasshouse”), “my body’s floating down the muddy river” (distorted Hail to the Thief-era political screed precursor “Like Spinning Plates”), and Yorke laments to the listener that “if you’d been a dog, they would have drowned you at birth” (the gloomy, sinister “Knives Out”). And the instrumentals follow suit, doubling down on all of Kid A’s alienating weirdness and drenching Yorke’s ominous songwriting in spectral piano chords, phantasmagoric distortions, and bursts of funereal jazz. Kid A’s penultimate track, the haunted “Morning Bell,” returns as “Morning Bell/Amnesiac” in a shorter, lighter-on-its-feet rendering of somehow even greater unease that takes title track duties as if in sardonic reference to the fact that it’s the only part of this record one even could remember — even amidst the maelstrom of apocalyptic turn-of-the-millennium paranoia, Radiohead never lack a sense of humor.
To kill the old Radiohead and birth a new one, Yorke drew on influences from ambient electronic artists like Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin (whose 1994 Selected Ambient Works Volume II anticipates some of Kid A’s atmospheric unease). They began tinkering around with synthesizers and sustain units, bringing in new sounds and mucking up the old ones, and guitarist Jonny Greenwood learned to play the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument invented in the 1920s (it appears most notably on Kid A’s title track as the vocoder on Yorke’s vocals). Yorke, who usually drove the band’s writing process by bringing them lyrics from which to work, suffered writer’s block and offered no complete musical ideas. Even the material that predated these sessions ended up pulled in new directions; softer, more melodic early drafts of “How to Disappear Completely” and “Life in a Glasshouse” heard in Meeting People is Easy bear only lyrical similarity to the versions that appeared on Kid A and Amnesiac, respectively. Instead, Yorke was largely driven by sound and rhythm, and the two albums that came from this angsty, fruitful period for the band sound as much like scores to a film that doesn’t exist as traditional rock pieces — at least in part because their idiosyncrasies don’t lend them many obvious comparisons aside from one another.
Indeed, it sometimes feels easier to draw visual comparisons than sonic ones. Stretches of Kid A feel like the cursed video dispatches from the future of John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (1987) or the beautifully hellish oblivion of The End of Evangelion’s (Anno, 1997) culminating Third Impact sequence. Promotional art from the era expresses similarly apocalyptic disquietude. If the burgundy skies and belching flames over spiny mountains on the Kid A cover weren’t suggestion enough, the rest of its art depicts more of this nether-place in sharp contrasts and scrawling nightmare imagery, a much starker palette of images than the lonely silhouettes and blue-toned highway interchanges of the OK Computer era.
No less affecting is the sequencing, which feels more primed to build mood than momentum (not that there isn’t plenty of grace there, too). The cold, futuristic ambience of “Everything in Its Right Place” doubles back on itself toward outright foreboding on second (and even less vocally-centered) track “Kid A” and returns, colder still, three tracks later on the tinkling, Eno-esque “Treefingers” three tracks later. “Optimistic” and “In Limbo” flow together in a suite-like sea of mood, and on Amnesiac, “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” interjects twitchy energy between the relatively quieter “Pyramid Song” and “You and Whose Army?” while “Hunting Bears” threads the space between jazz-stringed “Dollars and Cents” and the downtrodden distortion of “Like Spinning Plates” with reverberating tension.
Thom Yorke in Amnesiac‘s Michel Gondry-directed “Knives Out” music video
Few records are more synonymous with artistic rebirth than Kid A (a name that, while absent any definitive meaning, suggests one new lineage of many possible), and few rebirths are more explosively triumphant than Radiohead’s bold left turn into a new age. The irony, then, is that it all just made them more famous. I could probably circle back now to Pitchfork’s fawning adage, muse a bit on the miracle of these twin achievements, close things out with a wink. But I had seen plenty of shooting stars before I heard Kid A and Amnesiac, and I’m sure I’ve seen plenty more since then, and something about that natural marvel invocation doesn’t quite suit them; these are man-made monoliths, yes, but they’re also channelings of a jittering, fearful social id at the momentous juncture between then (the 1990s, the 1900s, the 1000s) and now (the year 2000 and all its then-futuristic baggage) that crackles with the pure sensations of paranoia and alienation perfectly expressed. As the years pass, their power just grows and grows.
Nosferatu with Radiohead: A Silents Synced Film (Nosferadiohead?) screens on March 4 at IU Cinema, pairing the band’s Kid A and Amnesiac with the 1922 silent film Nosferatu. Come for two of the millennium’s greatest albums on a world-class sound system, stay for a classic of silent cinema.