KID A

This release is the beggining of an electronic/non-commercial era.... then, a progger era, for better or for worse, musically speaking. In other words, this album breaks the "prog-or-not" controversy, most notably on their first two discs, because they incorpore here elements from progressive electronic (clearly some Brian Eno influence) and from Krautrock.

Well... let's try to analize the music contained on this.

- First of all, the classic three-guitar attack that caracterized their previous releases is absent here; in the other hand, the musicians pick up many synthetizers, drum programmings and rare arrangements in Thom's voice, creating a sound almost like industrial music or something like that. - The music style is hard to describe: a kind of electronic, ambient, krautrock...even still poppish, but progressive anyway, trust me! - The lyrics are definitely more complex and weird than before. Here some excerpts: "Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon" (from the opening track), "Ice age coming/ Let me hear both sides" (from Idioteque), "Where'd you park the car/ Clothes are all alone with the furniture" (from Morning Bell). As a conclusion: This kind of lyrics + the electronic direction + the instrumental arrangements used = extremely depressing tunes, as How to Dissapear Completely, In Limbo and the closing track. The structure of the songs is widely more complex than any previous track from OKputer of The Bends... Here, complex signatures are used to elabore the tracks... Despite it, the songs are mostly atmospheric - Treefingers as the perfect example (it reminds me any Brian Eno work), slow and finely elaborated. The several manipulated voices of Thom are very interesting, overall on the title track, which has a very special intro with a kind of electric xilophone (sound like "Gamelan").

Still a great album, it's not as good as its twin Amnesiac... maybe because this is such an experiment to start a new direction of the band, and this change is extremely strong and perhaps, hard to face to the fans. This is the main reason why the fifth star is absent.

Kind regards.