"I should be honest. While I am forever wanting to slap people who complained that Kid A was a precious thing for a band to do (the rationale here being that the band, knowing they’d sell tens of thousands of copies in their first week of release no matter what the damned thing sounded like, decided to test their audience’s gullibility and release an album they themselves didn’t actually like: I don’t buy this argument, and neither should you, unless you’re still young enough to find cynicism romantic, in which case may God bless you a little more than He’s apparently seen fit to do as of yet), I don’t actually listen to it much. I think it had some great songs on it, most especially “Idioteque,” which scares the bejabbers out of me, but in the end it’s almost too successful: it tries to be cold and off-putting and alien and inscrutable and so shiny that you can’t look directly at it, and so it is. It’s also perhaps less fully realized than Amnesiac, about which more shortly. It’s a fair guess that in five years or so people who listen to Kid A will hear things that absolutely no-one noticed when the album was new. I hope to be one of those people, and I promise to report back. It remains the case, though, that Kid A was at the very least a strong B+, certainly better than most anything else competing in its class, and that people who yammered on an on about how it was some sort of big unmusical gob in the faces of the band’s loyal fans are full of hot air. Such persons should be given looks of pity and condescension whenever the opportunity presents itself."
