Glad there's a good response to this. Up next....
3.
Kid A-Radiohead
10 years after the fact, and when Kid A is a sacred cow/part of the canon of accepted Classic Albums, it seems hard to remember just what a shock to the system Kid A was. What must be borne in mind was that following the huge success of The Bends and OK Computer, Radiohead had seemed poised to become a U2 around the time of Joshua Tree-type megaband. However it didn't quite pan out that way, with Kid A being a terrified, noisy record owing far more to Can and Philip Glass than to Nirvana and REM. This album was also a pivot in the switch from physical format to MP3 following it's leak, with the songs being reduced to a 35-minute download as opposed to part of a cohesive whole.
But what of the music? I, for my part, don't find it anywhere near as inaccessible as it was claimed to be on it's 2000 release, with some bizarrely hostile reaction in the music press from the respected( the New York Times' Nick Hornby claiming it was self-indulgence) to the not(Sharleen Spitieri of Texas lambasting them for supposedly harbouring delusions of being The Velvet Underground). When it comes down to it, the tracks are all melodic, 3-4 minutes in length, mostly vocal driven and contain nothing genuinely abrasive. It remains startlingly millennial, holds up fantastically to repeated listening, and is, if anything, the perfect follow-up to OK Computer. The fact it made it to Number One on both sides of the Atlantic with no promotional videos and a bare minimum of touring only seals my love for Radiohead and their contrary ways, and the success of this album proved the music-listeners were not all reduced to the level of Dad-rock and nu-metal. Tremendous stuff.