Kid A

Ice, ice, baby. The Columbia Glacier in Alaska has retreated nearly 13 kilometres since 1982. In 1999, its retreat rate increased from 25 metres per day to 35 metres per day. This alarming piece of environmental information is just one of the frosty facts concerning global ice melt to be found within the rather preachy sleevenotes of Kid A, Radiohead’s eagerly-awaited follow-up to 1997’s groundbreaking OK Computer – a band who, on the evidence of this album, certainly know a thing or two about retreating.

And also about being glacial, if not quite cool. “I swallow until I burst/Ice age coming, ice age coming,” Thom Yorke wails at one point. He may well have been singing about the expected reaction to Kid A – the most difficult fourth album I’ve ever heard from any band.

A lot of Radiohead fans – particularly those who loved them for Jonny’s sweepingly sonorous guitars and Thom’s gloriously strained and impassioned vocals – are going to be sorely disappointed with this release. For the most part, Kid A sees Thom Yorke and co playing with their backs to their audience. It’s therefore quite hard to see what they’re doing.

This may be the sound of a major band taking a sonic step outside of themselves, exploring the limits of possibility, seeing how far they can push things artistically – and the hell with what anybody else thinks. Or it may just be a bunch of chancers taking the piss and seeing how much they can get away with.

But is it any good? Maybe. There are ten tracks here, of which only two, or perhaps three, could even loosely be described as songs. Everything else is Eno-esque soundscape – ambient musings, warbly effects, smudged guitars, whispered snatches of lyrics. There’s certainly nothing that could conceivably be released as a single – no ‘Karma Police’, ‘Nice Dream’ or ‘Paranoid Android’.

The overall mood is one of dark, depressive alienation but there are enough erratic rhythms and sudden bursts of choral energy to occasionally lift it from the depth and let in the light. I suspect it’s a grower but it certainly won’t grow on everybody. But maybe that doesn’t matter.

It’s fair enough that Radiohead be allowed take whatever direction they wish. It’s their art, their expression, their career. However, this is such a radical departure that surely it would have been fair to the fans to warn them that this would be something completely different from everything that’s come before. When U2 did it, they called themselves Passengers. This is Radiohead, kids, but not as we knew them.

The hope for fans is that Kid A is actually a genuine attempt to create a great work of art – or at least take a giant step towards one – but we really won’t know that until the next album. For the record, I quite liked the interesting collection of sounds, rather than songs, and I suspect I’ll grow to like it a little more, before putting it away for a very long time.