Radiohead’s Amnesiac released May 30th, 2001, seven months after Kid A, the band's previous outing. You can’t talk about Amnesiac without talking about Kid A. Kid A rethought every aspect of Radiohead’s sound and took nothing off its previous album, OK Computer, for granted. You can’t talk about Kid A without talking about OK Computer, a release that pushed the rock band’s sonic limits but solidified them as a titan in a genre they’d grow to feel trapped in, following The Bends, Pablo Honey, and the breakout single “Creep.” You can’t talk about Radiohead without talking about “Creep.” If you only have time to talk about one Radiohead project, make it In Rainbows, a later classic that synthesizes elements from every Radiohead project in a prismatic, tight, ten track mission statement. Here lies the problem: It’s far too easy not to talk about this album. There’s some amnesia, um, surrounding Amnesiac.
Listen, even after I found out Amnesiac existed I thought it was Kid A B-sides for... several years. Reissued together as a double album in 2021, the two projects had been recorded in the same sessions and shared bonus material. Kid A was a dramatic about-face for the band. Amnesiac was more Radiohead tracks. Even Radiohead wasn’t sure if Amnesiac was its own album– after sessions spanning almost a year and a half from 1999 to 2000, the band had incubated 50 songs (more material than all their studio releases up until that point combined). In the end, many favored either a more electronic, ambient or fuller band sound, and from there were whittled down to two LPs that still shared a song. What do you call that? Amnesiac is like crawling through a spooky trapdoor in your new house and finding another house, which is really scary when it happens in a movie, but awesome when it’s a Radiohead album.
The relation is only ever rendered in similes. And lack of consensus traps the ground Amnesiac stands on. To me, the most compelling way to describe the creation is as a sequel.
Despite the band’s initial indecisiveness surrounding the record, Amnesiac wasn’t poised to be Kid B. It released with two singles, “Pyramid Song” and “Knives Out,” (two more than Kid A did) one of which streams well, the other had a movie franchise named after it. And the band played three North American shows supporting Kid A. After Amnesiac, they spent a summer touring the continent. In a Rolling Stone interview, O’Brien called “Pyramid Song” “the best song we’ve recorded.” Radiohead had remained in the public eye because of its individual, standout tracks. With more time in the oven, the sequel received the only material recorded outside the 1999-2000 sessions: its wailing funeral march closer, Life In a Glasshouse. In 2001, there was a very vocal backlash to Kid A that Amnesiac seemed to respond to. I love this very English quote: “With the benefit of hindsight, Kid A's wilful racket now recalls the clatter of a rattle being thrown from a pram.” (“Relax: it’s nothing like Kid A,” The Guardian.) At the time, Thom Yorke described it this way: “In some weird way, I think Amnesiac gives another take on Kid A, a form of explanation.” Today, you can’t talk about Amnesiac without talking about Kid A.
So goes the curse of the sequel. I can only hope to record some of the chorus drowning this album out in the name of pinning it down. What’s really so striking about it, to me, is that chorus. I’m torn that we’ve still barely talked about the actual music. “When you listen to the two albums, they sound completely different,” O’Brien continues. “They could have been made in different years. The fact is, Kid A and Amnesiac were made at the same time.” A breath of fresh air, Amnesiac’s also a one-way counterweight sequel, the second conjoined twin, in debt to Kid A from conception. Its barbed guitar and oxidized edges sound more jaded to me. It sounds like waking up back home, in a familiar Kid A gloom, and California’s just a dream I’m already starting to forget. As I’m writing this, I’ll be back in Seattle in a week. I’ve been thinking about sequels a lot lately.
When I got to school in San Francisco a few months ago, I’d left some baggage in Seattle. In some ways, I was a little emotionally blank. This new city carried no bittersweet memories, no traces of a deep melancholy as summer didn’t turn to fall. California stayed golden. It was a very Radiohead-brand kind of peace in nonfeeling. This is a feeling afforded to the restart, not the sequel. Home for a few days in November, my bags were waiting for me in all my old haunts. There’s an undeniable emotional weight to being resuscitated back to an old life, not fully defined by your present, not all the way there. People see right through you. When Amnesiac forgets, Push/Pulk says “this is still a sequel.” I don’t know if I want to be in a sequel, but that’s just how unfinished business is. And when it’s gray and cold again, I’ll just relax: it’s not Kid A. It helps there’s two albums to map this feeling onto. Let’s see if I can, please, appreciate Amnesiac for Amnesiac.
24 Dec, 2023
The Pacific Northwest really is a beautiful part of the country. In winter, it eschews the golden light of California and the West Coast for more of an accent complimenting the periwinkle and deep greens of its mountains and trees. The gold remains in the foggy, rainy winter months to be seen at sunrise and 4PM sunsets, a... golden, um, lining to soften the Puget Sound's erosive effects on the people living under its rain shadow. It can be easy to feel tricked by a gray Christmas in Washington, but one only needs to look out the window at dawn (given there's a view and not a building on the other side) to remember why so many choose to wait out the holiday season in this city of tears.
Don't forget...
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