Red Wine and Sleeping Pills, Help Me Get Back To Your Arms

Here comes the top 3. Bronze, Silver, and Gold medal winners of the past decade. I really struggled with where to put this next record in the Top 20. It clearly belonged somewhere near the top, but lost some points because I just don't reach for it to listen to all that much. That being said, it's a legendary record and a bold artistic statement from a band whose career is full of them.

NUMBER 3:

Radiohead - Kid A

Many have argued in their Decade's Best columns that this album is the cream of the crop. Released in the first year of the decade (or the last year of the 1900s, if you're a stickler), it's easy to discuss Kid A as Radiohead's break from "typical songwriting". This album is a clear break from the guitar-rock of The Bends and can only be considered a distant cousin of OK Computer. Tape loops, computerized vocals, lots of keyboards, ambient noise - these are the fabrics that add up to the tapestry of Kid A. The listener knows from the first keyboard tones, back-tracked Thom Yorke vocals, and lack of guitars of "Everything In Its Right Place" that uncharted waters were being traversed. This song (and most of the others on the record) are clearly songs built for headphones - the experience is totally different when heard through that method.

"The National Anthem" sounds a little like "older" Radiohead, and blisters with a thundering bass line. The band performed it live on Saturday Night Live around the time that Kid A was released and tore the doors off of the studio with a full horn section in tow. "How To Disappear Completely" is as self-loathing as it gets, with Yorke droning, "I'm not here/This isn't happening", but is achingly beautiful at the same time. Each song on the album hits different highs, and while each track is excellent, the whole is certainly greater than the sum of its parts.

As alluded to in the intro, this album is not one that we at the Ideological Cuddle reach for frequently, but once one song gets in your head, you kind of need to listen to the whole thing. This is what makes the historical context of this record so massive. Radiohead, who had already moved to the forefront of modern rock with OK Computer, had ditched everything that made them so successful on each side of the pond, single-handedly resurrected the "headphone album" and, for that matter, the album concept altogether. Sounding like a futuristic cousin of classic 70s prog-rock played with instruments from the moon, Kid A paved the way for other headphone masterpieces of the past decade (like, everything that The Flaming Lips have produced). It was ahead of its time, set in motion the rest of Radiohead's art of the past decade (its sister album, Amnesiac and recent opus, In Rainbows, almost beat out Kid A for this slot on the list), and continues to sound timeless to this day.

Kid A - "Everything In Its Right Place"

Only two albums left in the Decade's Best. What could they be? How many times will we cheat and pick two albums by one artist to fill a slot ? (The answer is once more, but I digress.)

As many of the previous 18 albums, the top two have real significance to this writer. What separates them from the other 18 is how often I find myself reaching for them. They get played over and over and over again, and have become woven into my everyday life.

Until next time, be well, chill, and listen.