HOW DID WE GET HERE is a column where UNLACED’s least musical Matt Gawronski reviews an album and tries to figure out how the artistic milieu got so far away from him, so fast. Maybe it lets him work out some unresolved feelings about his long-gone boyhood, or, come to grips with the rapidly swinging pendulum that is his cultural irrelevancy, or, maybe he’s just a sadist. In a special episode, we thought it would be funny if he reviewed Radiohead’s seminal 2000 album Kid A, a record that polarised an audience, defined a generation of Internet music-listening and has since been regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time. He gave it a 5/10.

An unremarkable but ever-present aspect of modern life is lists. While I’m sure that lists have been a thing for as long as written language has existed, I feel that there’s a significant and noteworthy distinction to be drawn between ‘The Ten Commandments’ and ‘Top Ten Funniest Doritos Commercials’. In the past fifteen or so years, the internet evolved from a vast, complex web of discrete thoughts and opinions and facts and entertainment, into something much more linear, and simple, and possibly more boring. There’s no longer any need to dive deep into the forums of nerds with special interests to find out which piece of tech you should look at buying next, and if you feel like finding a new film you haven’t heard of to watch, you just need to throw some key words into Google: “most underrated films 2019”. That search alone produces almost one and a half million results. Thousands and thousands of pages where the nerds have already done the hard work for you. All you need to do is scroll through, write down a few titles, and begin that list of your own. That list that you will never really get through, as greedy as you are. You’ll never quite be in the right mood for that Tarkovsky movie, and The Brothers Karamazov looks too long for what you need right now, and that Godspeed You! Black Emperor kind of has a stupid name, and you’re certain that means those things won’t scratch the itch you have right now, at 9pm on a Thursday, as you sit in the dim of your room and scroll through a list that you’ll regularly add to but rarely cross off.

I have these lists too. Better than yours of course, but they exist.
Lists of ideas, of jokes, of important numbers, and films to watch. And I don’t cross them off either because, no, I will probably never be in the mood to watch a film called Atomic Blonde. But one day I might be. Maybe. So, the list remains. If I died today, my phone preserved immaculately for millennia, a future civilisation would find it amongst my bones and conclude that I was an immensely unsatisfied guy. A guy with many plans, all of them unfulfilled. A sexy little dead guy who never got round to listening to Radiohead. They would laugh at my skeleton in their spacesuits like creepy little cyber hyenas, and I would haunt their spaceship until I got my fill.

But hopefully we can avoid that.

Here is my first step into Radiohead, it better not be shit.

“Everything In Its Right Place”
I have to say I’m relieved to find that I enjoyed this. Is it pointless to point out that this absolutely feels like the start of a great album? I think a lot of albums struggle with an opener, but this feels written purely for that purpose and it works to great effect. Listening to the synth and the keys, my mind was melding with the mind of our century’s greatest killer Jason Bourne. I could see myself, as him, wandering among the cold streets of somewhere in blue Europe, yearning and plotting. I didn’t expect to enjoy the little whispers in the background passing by my ears throughout the song, but I think they reminded me of The Others from LOST. Massively expecting the next song to open with a strong guitar riff. Will report back.

“Kid A”
Uhoh!

My first thought is that it’s strange that they would use this as the title track of the album, and I think it may be a concerning sign of things to come for me. I don’t hate this, but it most reminds me of Fiona’s music box from Shrek 2 but with a drum track overlayed. A lovely bassline comes in about halfway through and my thought was ‘Here we go!’ but then it disappeared just as quick as it had arrived. I think that if I was to make one prediction about the next nine tracks, it would be that I am not angsty enough to enjoy sombre music. I don’t have that nostalgia, that vivid memory of a teenage moment of sadness where they sat in their room and listened to something new and exciting that seemed to perfectly thread the needle of the complex emotions ravaging their brain. I mainly enjoyed FIFA with my friends and listened to Fall Out Boy.

“The National Anthem”
I’m in my beat-up Chevrolet Camaro driving to a drug deal. As the bass rattles the rearview mirror, I check to see if I’m being tailed. All clear. Discordant horror sounds blast through decade old speakers and they have me on edge. I open the glove box and see that it’s still there. I’m nervous and I open it again moments later and pull out the pistol. Yes, there’s one in the chamber. I tuck it under my seat. My thumbs are tapping against the steering wheel when the trumpets chime in. Oh fuck. Something horrible is going to happen. I’m in trouble.

Listening to this song is the first time in a while where I’ve really stopped and thought about how music gets written. The last lyric of the track ends with two whole minutes to spare, and then those two minutes are filled with a horrific chorus of brass and fear. How do you plan that? How do you even write it down?

I don’t think I would ever recommend this to anyone on its own, but I liked it.

“How To Disappear Completely”
For some reason, the appearance of acoustic guitar in this album completely took me off guard. I guess in my head I had Radiohead pinned as an electronic, synthy band, but I do quite like the use of it here in conjunction with those other apparent staples of the album. I noticed for the first time during this that Thom Yorke only ever writes song lyrics that are four or five words to a line. It’s all very simple and straightforward too, which isn’t at all what I expected when entering this album. Again this just makes me wonder about the dozens of different ways that an artist can approach songwriting, because if you compare the rather abrupt lyrics of Radiohead:

I'm not here
This isn't happening
I'm not here
I'm not here
In a little while
I'll be gone
The moment's already passed
Yeah, it's gone

To a band like, say, Parquet Courts:

I've learned how not to miss
The age of tenderness that I
Am so lucky to have seen once
And now that I've become older
I've learned how to brush over
My history and how it's sequenced

There’s just such a significant difference in the way in which they each want to tell the story. Each attempt is valid, of course, but I do know which I prefer.

“Treefingers”
There’s very little in music that I enjoy less than The Electric Hum. It’s why I struggle with The 1975, it’s why most Coldplay is boring, and it’s why I never got around to listening to Radiohead before today. This isn’t a song. It’s a noise.

“Optimistic”
Now this is a good song. I like this. I will say that this is the one where Yorke sounds most like that guy from Muse, but honestly that’s fine. Starlight is a banger. Better than every song on this album so far.

The more I think about it, maybe this is actually a negative review of the song. I feel like I can’t be positive about a track that makes me want to listen to Muse on a Friday night. Maybe this song is evil. Maybe that’s the point? Probably, who cares.

“In Limbo”
A lot of these tracks sound like five musicians started reading the music for five completely different songs at the same time. This is one of the least effective of this genre of mess. The guitar riff that accompanies the chorus is a downbeat that makes me want to stop listening. It feels like the kind of thing that’s been designed in a lab by the American government to be annoying, and I’d wager fair money that it’s currently being pumped into the ears of a fifteen-year-old boy at Guantanamo Bay.

I wonder if Johnny Greenwood gets the royalties. Awful.

“Idioteque”
Before I begin to speak about this song, I just want to stress that I really do love my friends. These days, they’re all good people. They want what’s best for the world and for me, and I think that they deserve the best for themselves too.

That being said, upon finding out that I was going to do this album for a review, one of my friends told me that Idioteque is one of their favourite songs ever. And, man, I don’t think that I can ever look at them again with the same respect I had before these five minutes and nine seconds. What a terrible piece of music. On top of all of my pondering earlier about the songwriting process for big bands, there is an unspoken question that remains: how the fuck do you not realise when you’ve made a stinker?

This song was genuinely difficult to get through. Repetitive in all the ways you don’t want it to be. Whiny. Groaning. Christ, I need to re-evaluate some of my group chats.

“Morning Bell”
This song reminds me of the first time I tried to watch Oldboy. I’d heard so much about it and I was really excited to tick it off of my list, but then the torrent I had of it (this was before streaming existed) had an American dub. It was awful. I knew that there was something good beneath the dub but I couldn’t get past it. Some things are just too distracting, too evil for you to ignore. Thom Yorke’s voice in this song is the same as that horrible American dub. Why is he pushing himself that hard when it sounds so bad? Is there no one there to tell him how bad it sounds? Is this all on purpose?

I have a feeling I will be told that it’s on purpose. That the pain I felt listening is the pain he felt writing the song. But to me that is balls. I should feel nice when I listen to music. Music shouldn’t be challenging; it should be a delicious bite of chocolate.

I got covid in 2021 and haven’t really been able to taste chocolate since.

“Motion Picture Soundtrack”
This strikes me as an Adele song and I mean that in the nicest possible way. Really enjoyed this track. Lovely lyrics, lovely melody to it, Thom stays within his vocal range and we all have a nice time.

While we’re here, there’s a band called Motion City Soundtrack that I really like. You should listen to them.

“Untitled”
I’m always an upset when a band releases a song called “Untitled”. You really couldn’t think of anything? Nothing at all that might describe this track? You’re a real piece of shit.

I’m actually quite confused now that I’ve finished my first Radiohead album. On one hand, I can see why the nerds and the geeks would elevate them to God status, but on the other I’m wondering why anyone would ever casually listen to this. In my third year of university, Lockdown One struck England and in our house of five we suddenly had to find a lot of new ways to entertain ourselves within our four walls. One of the things that a few of us would do is lay down in the pitch black of our living room and put on a film score, like Interstellar, or something a bit less abstract like The War of the Worlds. In the darkness, with full focus, you felt like you were experiencing something a bit beyond the music that you were listening to, and it quickly became one of our favourite things to do. Kid A seems like the kind of album that would be best enjoyed in that same environment. With darkness, and silence, there’s nothing good to distract you from enjoying its mediocrity.

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