Two decades have passed since a seminal pair of albums for the Oxford band, a reissue with unreleased material celebrates them.
“The twenty-first century is oppressed by a suffocating sense of finiteness and exhaustion,” wrote Mark Fisher in Specters of My Life. At the beginning of the third millennium Radiohead expressed these feelings with their music. The band, fresh from the worldwide success of Ok Computer in 1997, was in search of his identity; its members were divided between those who wanted to remain in the comfort zone of a granite rock and those who pushed lost the experimentation with hybridizations of electronic music and jazz. The two albums “Kid A” and “Amnesiac”, released precisely between 2000 and 2001, marked a point of no return for the oxoniense quintet, skilled in superimposing fin de siècle fears on songs that flex pop structures in vocal fragments, sinister atmospheres beyond Charles Mingus and digitizations dear to the Boards Of Canada.
Long recording sessions
Both discs are the result of long recording sessions that slowly began to capture a geometric and alienating creativity, capable of intertwining the hypnotic liquid on which “Pyramid Song” floats and the cold blanket of synthetic sounds that surrounds “Everything In Its. Right Place “. At the same time, the two covers perfectly encapsulate the sonic identity of the albums: the artwork of “Kid A” represents fires that develop behind some snowy hills, while in “Amnesiac”, to put it in the words of singer Thom Yorke, “We are in the middle of the forest during the fire.”
Outside the tracks on the two albums, the world, which was curled up on itself like the Twin Towers in the 9/11 attacks, discovered the iPod and looked to the Netherlands, the first country to legalize same-sex marriage. That world that witnessed Bush’s oath and Blair’s second term, watched the images of the Genoa G8 on TV and learned to become familiar with blogs. Inside the Radiohead songs hovers the fear of the environmental apocalypse caused by climate change – in Idioteque the ice age is coming, anticipated by the screeching of mobile phones – and political invectives inflame the emblematic “Dollars And Cents” and “You And Whose. Army? ” dedicated to the newly elected British Labor Prime Minister. Also for this reason the critics welcomed the discs with great enthusiasm.
Kid A Mnesia
To celebrate the two decades since the release of the fourth and fifth Radiohead albums, the band has decided to release “Kid A Mnesia”, a collection that includes the two discs and unreleased material re-emerged from the archives. Between alternative versions of previously published songs and b-sides, some unreleased songs embellish the tracklist, including the obscure and magnetic “If You Say The World”. After some time, the notes of “Kid A and Amnesiac” still echo, also because they heralded the ruthless dystopias of Squid Game and the fears of a possible metaverse. (Re) listen to believe.
