Radiohead: Do They Suck The Young Blood?
The end of decade lists recently published betray a lack of critical consensus about the greatest music of the past ten years. A result of the increasingly fractured and subdivided musical genres, a function of the way the internet has changed the way we listen to and think about music? Perhaps, but that’s not what this article is about. One of the things that the lists generally agree on is Kid A. This puts Radiohead in the curious position of having two albums widely considered to be among the best of the decade they were released in – indeed Pitchfork would have you believe that both Kid A and OK Computer are the single best albums released in their respective decades. OK Computer regularly tops lists of Best Ever Albums, by both expert panels of critics and the public. Yet, for all this adoration, universal acceptance still eludes Radiohead. A small yet significant and very vocal minority cries out against the canonization of their albums, painting Yorke and co. as whiny bores overintellectualising rock, or simply getting credit for poorly recycling other people’s ideas. In terms of influence, fan worship and controversy, it’s all too easy to compare Radiohead to The Smiths. Certainly they inspire equal amounts of worship and vitriol in their supporters and detractors respectively.
Where do I stand? Good question. I consider myself a lapsed Radiohead fan. I heard Pablo Honey and The Bends at an impressionable age, and they were one of the few modern bands that made a mark on my prog-addled teenage brain. I remember hearing OK Computer, Kid A and Amnesiac later, after all three had come out, and being impressed that the post-grunge band from the first two albums had changed so much, but finding the latter two distinctly unmemorable. To stop this from morphing into a life story, I eventually became a much bigger fan, only to find my affection cooling off later. I’m pretty sure some of this is a reaction to the hype – so much intensive information and discussion about music only serves to dull its magic in your mind. However, I’m not sure that’s entirely it. I don’t argue with Radiohead haters in music arguments because, to a certain extent, I see their point and even kind of agree with it.
I don’t think Radiohead overintellectualise rock, I think that’s a load of nonsense. No artist should be bound by other people’s preconceptions of what they should or should not be doing. Also, in this world we are cursed by Radiohead’s vastly VASTLY inferior mirror universe copies Muse and Coldplay, who actually both emphasise Radiohead’s own strengths quite nicely. Muse’s stodgy and sonically ugly schmindie rock and Coldplay’s horrifically bland U2-isms not only vindicate Radiohead’s choice to follow a more interesting path after the success of The Bends and OK Computer but also show how damn good Radiohead were at schmindie rock and bland U2-isms before they got bored with them.
However, none of Radiohead’s albums are consistently brilliant, even the admittedly excellent OK Computer. And, for all their vaunted pushing of the envelope, there’s nothing radically new in OK Computer, Kid A or Amnesiac. The surprising thing is that they came from a fairly competent rock band and the latter two sold impressively for what they are. Which is a user-friendly rehash of experimental rock down the years. Many of these ideas were pretty old by the time Radiohead got to them – Pink Floyd and krautrock leave their fingerprints over both records – and many of them aren’t even from particularly obscure sources. Sure, there’s the odd shout out to Faust, but Floyd were and are hugely popular. Radiohead were beaten to the punch in exhuming Pink Floyd and Genesis by Marillion, whose excellent Brave is surely an influence on OK Computer, with its spooky ambience derived from a haunted castle and its premillenial dread pre-empting Radiohead’s effort by a number of years, and the end result is much more generous spirited as well. Other more modern influences, from Sigur Ros to the entire 90s output of Warp Records, may have been a bit closer to the cutting edge, but still were hardly old news and actually sold reasonable amounts. While Kid A was intended to be alienating on first lesson, it’s not as if Radiohead dropped their listeners entirely in the deep end.
But, perhaps more importantly, there is something very worthy and po-faced about Radiohead’s music, which maybe stems from their angst-fuelled early days in the aftermath of grunge. They make serious art, dammit. Look at many of their (more adventurous) sonic sources though, and you will see bands with much more of a sense of humour. From Faust to Aphex Twin, the best experimental music is able to be fun and engaging whilst pushing the boundaries. And for all their moping, Radiohead are unable to summon the bleak, frightening austerity that makes records like The Marble Index and Closer so bracing. At the end of the day, for all their risk-taking, there is still something incredibly white bread about Radiohead.
Enough on the rhetoric. How do I actually feel about Radiohead’s actual music? I don’t know. It’s been ages since I’ve been able to listen to them. The thought occurred to me that being here in Costa Rica is as far away as I’m likely to get from Radiohead, so this is an excellent time to revisit their albums away from all the noise, and try to assess them fairly and objectively. And then give each one a crass Pitchfork rating out of 10.0. I am genuinely curious to find out what I make of the music now. I have decided that I will listen to all their studio albums, including frakking Pablo Honey, as well as the officially released live album I Might Be Wrong. I’m not going to delve into Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood’s solo albums here, as they don’t have quite the cultural cachet that their day job has, so my opinion of them is less likely to be influenced by all the hype if I ever get round to hearing them. I have also decided not to listen to all of Radiohead’s B-sides or any compilations thereof. However, I will be talking about the odd B-side in between albums when appropriate, largely because two of my favourite ever Radiohead tracks are B-sides and I have nowhere else to cram them in. In my review of In Rainbows, I will ignore the way the record was released, and judge it entirely on the merit of the music itself, which is what all the idiots who reviewed it at the time should have done. But while I’m here, I may as well point out that I thought the whole thing was a cynical attempt to get attention and ultimately get the fans who care about the band the most to pay twice for the same thing. Bands as diverse as Marillion, Coil, Einsturzende Neubauten and Ghost Box records have been using the internet for most of this decade in increasingly innovative ways without making such a bloody fuss. You can still download Marillion’s excellent Happiness Is The Road from their website free of charge, long after Radiohead took down In Rainbows and replaced it with the traditional paying version. Lastly, I’m magnanimously going to spare Radiohead the utter embarrassment of dredging up the execrable ‘Pop Is Dead’, because I’m such a nice guy.
Onward to the reviews! But first: ahahahahahahaha, ‘Pop Is Dead’ is so shit! OK done now.
Pablo Honey (1993)
And so the Radiohead story starts not with a bang, but with a whimper. Pablo Honey is infamously not very good, and perhaps the only surprise here is just how poor the debut of one of the most widely respected bands in the world now is. But then again, perhaps part of Radiohead’s appeal stems from the fact that instead of arriving fully formed, they started off rough and ready and drastically improved.
Amongst the daft things frequently written about this band is the epithet ‘last’ – Radiohead are the last great guitar band, the last band to really matter and so on. Palpably rubbish, but in one way it makes sense, at least for now – any band around today who released an album this uninspiring would be lucky to be allowed the time and funding to develop into something better. Radiohead’s get out of the scrapyard free card was, of course, minor indie hit ‘Creep’. Listening to it today, you’re reminded why it became a hit in the first place and why you never want to hear the damn song ever again. As a whole, the album is firmly rooted in its time. In 1993, Simon Reynolds used the term ‘post rock’ to describe a movement in music that Radiohead would later be associated with, but there’s no sign whatsoever of that on this recod. Instead we get grungey alternative rock. It’s a genre that has yet to really have a hipster revival, and really that’s for the best, because by and large it just wasn’t really any good.
While in retrospect it’s kind of interesting to hear the defining features of Radiohead’s sound – Johnny Greenwood’s guitar and Thom Yorke’s voice – in their nascent form, both sound decidedly unformed and unsure of their own strengths. The music is a mix of fairly standard alt-rock influences – the most prominent being stadium-era REM and U2, and of course Nirvana – but it rarely coalesces into anything individual or interesting. The exceptions are ‘You’, a hard rocker that builds up from delicate guitar picking and hints at where the band would go next, and ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’, a compelling mess of Sonic Youth-esque guitar nailed to a snarky lyric.
The rest of the album drones by in a haze of angsty awkwardness. Radiohead have three guitarists, which always seems on paper somewhat redundant, and though later on they would figure out a sensible way to orchestrate them, here they just obfusticate and cloud up the already muddy and confused songs. ‘Thinking About You’ is vaguely memorable for being the first showing of the band’s gentler, acoustic side, though lyrics equating masturbation with self-loathing can’t quite raise the song into genuinely good territory. ‘Stop Whispering’ betrays the band’s Pixies influence, though the band’s lackluster musicianship and uninspiring writing make the comparison a decidedly unfavourable one. ‘Prove Yourself’ is kind of cute and kind of pathetic. The rest of the LP is deplorable, to the extent that you feel embarrassed for the band listening to it, (‘How Do You’ is actually hilariously awful). In particular, the adolescent, angsty lyrics must make Thom Yorke cringe these days. Pablo Honey has never been reassessed by anyone, and, frankly, it’s unlikely to be because it doesn’t deserve it. Listened to today, it’s remarkable how un-Radiohead-like much of the music on Pablo Honey is. Don’t worry, they got better.
Rating: 3.8
The Bends (1995)
The Bends is a remarkable improvement on Radiohead’s debut. It’s far more assured and confident, the music stronger and more coherent. It’s actually a pretty good album. That being said, it’s not quite the unadulterated masterpiece many would have you believe. Exactly half of The Bends is utterly fantastic. Sadly, the other half is less convincing, and sees the band still stumbling over some of the problems that plagued their debut.
The good songs first. The album starts off strong, with ‘Planet Telex’ arriving in a cloud of spacey whooshes and dry ice, with echoplexed guitars and much improved vocals, followed by the title track. The songwriting is much more complex and well realized right off the bat, as are the arrangements, which find time to incorporate weirder, quieter moments amidst the clarified rock punch. ‘The Bends’ takes a well-aimed swipe at Britpop nostalgia, firmly setting the band against all that self-important, retro nationalistic tripe, the fear and self-loathing of the lyrics almost undercut completely by the song’s glorious, anthemic chorus. ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ is still just beautiful, undulled by years of familiarity. A nuanced study of the hollowness of modern life, it swells up from an acoustic beginning to a grand climax, and shows just how inventive Radiohead were becoming with their arrangements – the texture of the song morphs subtly through spacey keyboards to full on guitar rock. ‘Black Star’ is a far better rewrite of ‘More Than A Feeling’ then ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ ever was, replete with twinkling guitar fade in and mellow harmonies contrasted against a brutal crunching guitar riff. ‘Just’ sees self-loathing from the other side with a snarling guitar line derived from Magazine’s ‘Shot By Both Sides’, and has some very nifty guitar work. Nocturnal closer ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’ is a thing of limpid wonder, with its cyclical guitar riff perfectly complementing the blurred, dreamlike shifts between nightmare and dream in the lyrics.
These songs alone make The Bends more then worth your while, but unfortunately, that’s only half the story. The rest of the songs are not so strong. While there’s little here that’s outright embarrassing, (though ‘Nice Dream’ comes close), there’s also very little that’s up to much. Radiohead’s songwriting was still letting them down. ‘My Iron Lung’ is a compelling song with a cool guitar riff, until the band completely lose the plot with an almost comically bad heavy section. ‘Sulk’ is utterly forgettable and ‘Bones’ is a clumsy mess. Another problem is the horrible guitar sound that the band seem to favour on their first two albums: not noisy enough to be truly bracing and lacking enough low end to give the sound definition, the end result is an indeterminate, heavy yet curiously limp sounding mess. The real surprise here is how poor Radiohead’s gentler, less rocky songs are. ‘High and Dry’, ‘Nice Dream’ and ‘Bullet Proof… I Wish I Was’ are all horrifically bland and approach U2-esque levels of crassness and painful sincerity. They really don’t suggest at all how well Radiohead would manage once they ditched their alt-rock tendencies.
Another thing I feel I must mention at this juncture is Radiohead’s lyrics. Thom Yorke trades in vagueness and inscrutability. When this works, it works very well, creating an underlying sense of paranoia or dread that’s never specifically pinned down, allowing the listener’s imagination to fill in the blanks, and Yorke would eventually wind up very good at this indeed. However, at this stage, there are many cases where it simply doesn’t work – Yorke sounds like he really is singing about nothing, or else nails together a phrase so gutwrenchingly clumsy it wrecks the entire mood of the song. ‘Now I can’t climb the stairs/ Pieces missing everywhere….’ Sometimes it sounds like he isn’t even trying. Or trying too hard and failing. There are many such examples on the album, ‘Nice Dream’ is particularly bad.
So, while The Bends is a definite step up from Pablo Honey and marks Radiohead’s first step on the trail towards greatness, the band still encounter teething troubles on the way. Its good songs are often great, but its poor songs are often very poor indeed, and The Bends doesn’t quite manage to stand up by itself as a truly great LP. However, there is magic to be found in its grooves for sure, and they were getting there.
Rating: 6.7
‘Bishop’s Robes’/‘Talk Show Host’ (1996)
They were getting there very fast indeed. These two B-sides from the ‘Street Spirit’ single show that by the next year, Radiohead were leaving The Bends behind full speed and gearing up to make their masterpiece. Both of these songs could have sat on The Bends, and while they would have wrecked the flow of the album completely, they would have sat happily with the album’s best songs. ‘Bishop’s Robes’ is a glorious, string-laden ballad of the type Coldplay wish they could write. ‘I am not going back,’ sings Yorke wistfully at the chorus as he gives Oxford a quietly brutal kiss-off. If ‘Bishop’s Robes’ anticipates OK Computer’s melodic grandeur, then ‘Talk Show Host’ marks out Radiohead’s path afterwards. Twinkling keyboards and Yorke’s paranoid yelping are repeatedly undercut by a monstrous bassline and breakbeats copped straight form The Happy Mondays copping Can. Truly a thing of twisted beauty, and one of my favourite Radiohead songs.
NOTE: From this point onwards, all of Radiohead’s studio albums suffer from lousy mastering. I don’t want to talk about this at great length here, but if you master and album entirely in the red it removes all the dynamics, makes the instruments not sound like real instruments and makes the whole thing unpleasant to listen to. Radiohead’s albums certainly aren’t the worst mastered out there, but it is noticeable, and it does effect my enjoyment of this on the whole very good music. All these albums deserve better then that.
OK Computer (1997)
Apres ca, le deluge. After this album, in the eyes of the world Radiohead could do no wrong. And as much as the wind up merchant in me hates this, it’s hard to deny the quality of this fantastic record. Certainly it remains Radiohead’s greatest achievement, the perfect blend of mature songwriting and sonic experimentation. Calling it the greatest album of all time is ridiculous, but it doesn’t stop OK Computer from being a really good LP.
The album storms in on a guitar riff copped from the middle section of ‘Red’ by King Crimson, all thundering break beats and shimmering guitar, as it races to rip through Magazine’s ‘Recoil’ in the coda. This is where the prog comparisons started in earnest, and it actually is a little deserved. ‘Paranoid Android’ adroitly navigates through three seemingly unrelated musical sections to create a coherent whole, ‘Exit Music (For A Film)’ features mellotron, and the whole album flows together so well the band would forever be fighting off accusations that it’s a concept album. The comparison most frequently made is to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon, which shares the album’s vague theme of the way the evils of society slowly drive you insane, but the album has an even more recent precedence in Marillion’s excellent Brave, and the two albums share a similar sound and musical ambition. Both albums also go to the brink of despair to find redemption and a new love of life at the end. OK Computer is positively dripping with alienation – to the extent that the extraterrestrials seem like a friendly alternative on ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ – but the album opens and closes with the image of a person walking out of a potentially fatal accident simply happy to still be alive. You can practically see Thom Yorke’s grin as he sings, ‘In an interstellar burst I am back to save the universe’ on ‘Airbag’, perfectly capturing the change of perspective forced on you by a brush with death. ‘Lucky’, at the other end of the album, is less outspoken about its joy but more profoundly moving for it. Possibly Radiohead’s single greatest track, ‘Lucky’ is quietly content to rise above all the bullshit in the world and serenely wait for the waters to subside, knowing that the important things will still be there. ‘The head of state has called for me by name / But I don’t have time for him…’ The song rises from delicate guitar effects and ghostly keyboards, through a fantastic Johnny Greenwood guitar breakdown all to leave the listener hanging on an interrupted cadence.
There is a deep vein of melancholy running through many of these tracks, particularly on the brutal, wounded ‘Exit Music (For A Film)’, which ends with Yorke murmuring brokenly, ‘We hope that you choke’, all aggression spent, all hope gone. ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ and ‘No Surprises’ both yearn for any sort of escape, however unlikely or horrific, from the crushingly mundane. However the album is not without humour, particularly on the justly iconic ‘Karma Police’. In the age of Oasis, Radiohead show you how to rip off a Beatles song (in this case ‘Sexy Sadie’) and come out looking intelligent on the other side. The lyrics call out for the Karma Police to come and arrest various unpleasant characters in an increasingly hysterical tone – it’s chorus of ‘This is what you’ll get / If you mess with us’ makes me think of Pink’s vile rant towards the end of The Wall – before the glorious coda reveals the whole set up to be a joke. Radiohead’s rhythm section, sometimes wondrous, sometimes a liability, shine particularly brightly here. Indeed their parts for the coda could almost be from a jazz standard, with the gentle, rolling drum fills and walking bass line. ‘Climbing Up The Walls’ almost resurrects Bauhaus for some tongue in cheek gothic horror, and ‘Electioneering’ is a coruscating, sneering attack against slimy politicians, and the first real sign of Radiohead’s political awareness on record.
Sadly the record just falls short of perfection. Much noise has been made about ‘Fitter Happier’, which, while it’s pretentious, is so short that it’s not really any sort of a problem. More damaging are ‘Let Down’, the dying echoes of Radiohead’s U2 influence coupled to some truly cringe-worthy lyrics, and ‘The Tourist’, the uneventful Johnny Greenwood song faced with the unenviable task of following ‘Lucky’ and closing the LP. However these are minor gripes on what is a very good record indeed. If Radiohead are unlikely to release anything ever as good again, neither are that many other bands. Greatest album of all time? Not by a long shot. Greatest album of the decade? Not even close. Bloody marvelous? You bet.
Rating: 9.2
Kid A (2000)
Inevitably this album was subject to ridiculous amounts of analysis on its original release, but I don’t really want to talk about that here. Hindsight allows us to look at Kid A as a transitional album rather then an end in itself, and as Radiohead advance on and on, this viewpoint makes more and more sense. It’s not that Kid A is a bad album – like The Bends, half of it is very good indeed. The album sounds like a band desperately trying to distance themselves from their previous album, and only partially succeeding.
Kid A makes a big song and dance about how different it is from OK Computer, but at the end of the day it’s not as if Radiohead went and released Metal Machine Music. Kid A is still identifiably a Radiohead album. Hell, many of the songs still have guitar and Thom Yorke’s unprocessed voice. In retrospect it’s a little surprising that it caused quite so much fan outrage. ‘How To Disappear Completely’ is a limpid aching ballad that could have easily fit on OK Computer, though it succeeds in being more depressing then anything on that album.
If OK Computer gets labeled prog, Kid A gets labeled post-rock. In some ways you can see what people are talking about, as the band was taking its experiments integrating rock with electronics to further, more leftfield extremes. ‘Everything In Its Right Place’, still one of Radiohead’s greatest songs, opens the album on an incredibly strong note. Like Sigur Ros if they were any good, the song is a hallucinatory swirl of keyboards and Yorke’s echoing, cut up vocals, turning his oblique lyrics into a kind of mantra. ‘The National Anthem’ is another top moment for the Radiohead rhythm section, all pounding drums and idiot bassline as all chaos breaks out over the top. The 5/4 time signature throws the whole band, but ‘Morning Bell’ is still an incredible song, with its melodic bass line and soaring melody hiding some truly disturbing lyrics, until the song breaks down halfway through and Yorke is left muttering to himself like a psychopath. ‘Idioteque’ truly is a thing of wonder, all glitching beats and wobbling keyboards while Thom Yorke’s paranoid rant about communication technology and government surveillance seems more and more chilling with each passing day. If you’re stuck in Britain, hahaha.
Unfortunately, not all of Kid A is an unqualified success. ‘Kid A’ is a poor Aphex Twin retread, and ‘Treefingers’ is nothing that Eno or Cluster didn’t do loads better in the early 70s. These tracks have all the hip post-rock influences of krautrock and electronica but unlike ‘Idioteque’ or ‘National Anthem’, they fail to do anything interesting with them, and the end result is self conscious and uninspiring. Not all of Kid A fails because Radiohead’s ambition overshoots itself either. ‘Optimistic’ is a dull, droning guitar lead song that is simply lacks the necessary guitar distortion to fit on side two of Pablo Honey. ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ opens off threatening to be an awesome Nico rip off, but simply peters out into nothingness, to pointlessly return in a cloud of confusing before slouching off again. I actually spent ages with the guitar tab of ‘In Limbo’ trying to find out if anything was actually happening in the song, because its very elusiveness fascinated me. Turns out it’s just a really boring song.
In a strange way, Kid A resembles The Bends more then any other Radiohead album. Once again, Radiohead felt the need to distance themselves from their past. Both albums see the band struggling against the boundaries of their previous work whilst containing hints of the rewards this struggle would eventually reap. As a result, Kid A is a far from coherent album, but it does contain some top drawer material, and its experiments allowed Radiohead to advance to the next stage in their musical journey.
Rating: 6.9
Amnesiac (2001)
Although a collection of offcuts from the Kid A sessions, Amnesiac is easily the superior LP. I think at this early stage, Radiohead wanted their transformation to appear more radical then it was, and so wound up second guessing themselves and putting out weaker material first in an effort to be weirder. With the benefit of hindsight, the connection between OK Computer’s sonic experiments – basically rebooting prog with electronica and post punk influences – runs through to Kid A and Amnesiac’s most interesting moments, and the more self consciously ‘experimental’ moments come off as more conservative because of how closely they ape their source material. In retrospect, the 12 track album they should have released in 2000 goes something like this:
Radiohead – Amnesiac Kid Is Wrong
Packt Like Sardines In A Crushed Tin Box
Pyramid Song
National Anthem (I Might Be Wrong Live version)
You And Whose Army
I Might Be Wrong
Knives Out
Morning Bell (I Might Be Wrong Live version)
How To Disappear Completely
Idioteque (I Might Be Wrong Live version)
Like Spinning Plates (I Might Be Wrong Live version)
Everything In Its Right Place
Life In A Glass House
See? Most of it’s Amnesiac, cause it’s a better, and better sequenced, album. Your welcome Nigel Godrich.
Anyway. The album starts off with another great Radiohead opener, ‘Packt Like Sardines…’, in which Yorke and the beat stutter across each other, the song’s protagonist driven to paranoid breakdown. ‘Pyramid Song’ is a gloriously daft choice for a single, an Egyptian death mantra set against an oblique piano line whose alien geometry would have HPL running for cover. ‘You And Whose Army’ lyrically mirrors the bunker mentality of ‘Talk Show Host’, switching from a bluesy croon to a full band march of defiance. ‘Knives Out’ could have happily sat on OK Computer, with its mesh of guitar lines and straightforward chorus. ‘Dollars And Cents’ is a dark, warped mess of krautrock and electronica which is genuinely compelling, as Thom Yorke turns himself into the information running through networks. I feel genuinely bad about leaving it off the above tracklist, but I suppose it could have been an awesome B-side.
Above all, Amnesiac proves that Radiohead’s strength comes from their openness to all sonic possibilities. Whereas Kid A sounds hermetically sealed in from the rest of the world, Amnesiac’s best moments steal from everything from krautrock and electronica through to blues and wonky jazz. Indeed, this is seen clearly in some of the album’s best tracks. ‘I Might Be Wrong’ is a bluesy, almost Stones-like grove overlayered with interlocking riffs and thudding electronic percussion, which all drains away for a glorious acoustic guitar break. ‘Life In A Glass House’, Radiohead’s most satisfying album closer since ‘Street Spirit’, is even more bizarre, a collaboration with jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton, which successfully nails Yorke’s paranoia to a woozy, almost drunk horn section. It shows just how far out Radiohead’s music can get without loosing any of its signature qualities.
This time round, the only songs that don’t work are the pointless ‘Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors’, actually a more interesting experiment in punctuation then in music, the slight ‘Hunting Bears’ and ‘Like Spinning Plates’, whose mix of backwards vocals, churning chords and electronics never quite coalesces into anything coherent. Also, ‘Morning Bell’ is reprised, inexplicably turned into a rather dull 4/4 ballad. But for the most part, Amnesiac is a powerful and fully realized album, the sound of a band confidently exploring new waters and becoming accustomed to its natural voice.
Rating: 8.3
‘Trans-Atlantic Drawl’ (2001)
This little gem wound up being relegated to B-side status, which is a bit of a shame as it really is fantastic. Rocking harder then anything from the Kid A sessions, ‘Trans-Atlantic Drawl’ hits the ground running. Pounding drums, fuzzed out guitar flying off at every angle and a demented playground lyrics of something about magazines, it comes across as Faust playing ‘Kandy Pop’ by Bis, especially as it reaches the chorus, where the fuzz reaches anthemically daft levels. Then, instead of verse two, someone cuts the tape and glues it half way through an exploration of frigid ambient drones. Brilliant.
I Might Be Wrong (2001)
Rather then take my sequencing advice, Radiohead may as well have waited for another year and just put out these live recordings instead, in which every version trumps the studio recording, apart from the muddy rendition of the title track. Forced to just play the songs instead of agonise over arrangements, the songs are stripped of the ever so slightly fussy studio versions’ ponderousness and take on a much more spontaneous and fun feel. Here Radiohead sound mischievous, drugged up, spaced out and muscular.
The album opens stunningly with the all-time classic version of ‘National Anthem’ riding in on a wave of static. The great thing about the original is that it’s basically just that riff, you can do what you like with it, and the band proceed to do just that. Overlaid with radio static, wooshy keyboards and spacey guitars, the song takes on a cosmic element only hinted at by the somewhat clinical studio version. The rhythm section is tight, brutal and focused, and Yorke’s vocals, as opposed to being processed to hell, are breathless and excited. ‘I Might Be Wrong’ is poorly recorded and not as exciting as it should be, lacking the subtle shade and build up of the original, but it still retains a murky charm. ‘Morning Bell’ is stunning, the playing here simultaneously more passionate and more focused then the original, with Yorke working himself into a frenzy during the coda. The band’s command of dynamics here is fantastic, as the guitars rise to a storm only for everything to suddenly cut back to menacing quiet. ‘Idioteque’ similarly benefits from a more immediate arrangement, the contrast of the band’s impassioned playing and the brutally mechanical electronics creating a tension entirely appropriate to the song’s lyrics. The result is a piece of electronic-tinged krautrock dance mash-up that anticipates LCD Soundsystem. ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ gets expanded into a sea of languid atmospherics, taking on an almost lullaby-like purity. It even starts off with Yorke singing, ‘Here comes the flood’, a shout out to Peter Gabriel surely. ‘Dollars And Cents’ becomes the dark cyberpunk nightmare it was always meant to be, with some particularly adroit drumming, and the delicate acoustic song ‘True Love Waits’ shows the band can still write conventional songs when they feel like it. But special mention must go to Amnesiac filler ‘Like Spinning Plates’, which, shorn of its messy backwards tape arrangement, becomes a glorious, proggy epic building effortlessly to an emotional peak.
Far more then simply a market filler in between studio works, I Might Be Wrong actually works out as Radiohead’s most satisfying post-OK Computer album. It’s to the point, deadly focused and shows off the sheer range and potential of the band’s new musical direction. At the end of the day, when forced to stand on their own two feet, this era of Radiohead prove that they’re an experimental force to be reckoned with, and a kick-ass rock band to boot.
Rating: 8.5
Hail To The Thief (2003)
If such a thing as an underrated Radiohead album is possible, then Hail To The Thief is it. Following on from the fawning admiration heaped on Kid A and its companion releases, perhaps the album simply lacks the shock value of those releases. Certainly, there are few surprises here in terms of content – the songs that integrate experimental textures into Radiohead’s standard bag of tricks work, the glitch experiments don’t. It doesn’t help that much of the fan base had patiently put up with Kid A and Amnesiac and was hoping for a return to standard alt-rock, which needless to say it didn’t get. It also doesn’t help that Hail To The Thief looks like someone taking the piss out of a Radiohead album, with its cover of a twisted alien landscape made up of bricks containing scary buzz words, the clunky political reference of the title, and each song’s portentous/pretentious subtitle, a trick not seen in a mainstream rock record since Yes’ Tales From Topographic Oceans. (‘Softly Open Our Mouths In The Cold’ and ‘Brush The Cobwebs Out Of The Sky’ are pretentious and vague enough to be Mew track names. Urgh.)
Which is actually a shame, as Hail To The Thief is bloody brilliant really, and at times equals and even surpasses its immediate predecessors. The two opening songs in particular are absolute Radiohead classics. The sort-of title track ‘2 + 2 = 5’ manages not to sink into anvilicious preaching despite its self-conscious Orwell reference, and instead its comparison of Bush and Blair to Chicken Little is a surprisingly effective way of calling them out over their handling of the truth during the Iraq war. Musically it opens with delicate guitar arpeggios before switching unexpectedly into an intense rocker, Yorke spitting ‘You have not been paying attention!’. The band sound more fired up then they have in the studio since OK Computer, but without loosing any of their experimental tendencies, as the next track so effortlessly proves. ‘Sit Down. Stand Up’ (punctuation trouble again) again manages to switch between wildly contrasting moods and timbres without missing a beat. This time, eerie strings and mournful vocals give way to an electric storm and massed, idiot chanting of ‘The raindrops/The raindrops/The raindrops…’ over and over again. If the whole album kept up this pace, it would be a stone cold classic.
Perhaps inevitably the pace drops. ‘Sail To The Moon’ is pleasant but forgettable, the setting that a lot of Radiohead’s ballads seem automatically set for these days. Then we have the inevitable electronica experiment, ‘Backdrifts’, which works about as well as you’d expect. To Radiohead’s credit, they seem to have realized that straight up ripping off Aphex Twin doesn’t work for them, so this time round Yorke’s voice is unprocessed, and pools of acoustic guitar are added to the mix. As a result it sounds less derivative and more like a Radiohead song, but sadly still not a very good Radiohead song. They repeat the whole exercise again a few songs later with ‘The Gloaming’, to equally inconsequential results. ‘Go To Sleep’ is another winner though, all sweeping guitar lines and a bleepy malfunctioning robot solo at the end. ‘Where I End And You Begin’ sees the band exhuming their U2 influence, but oddly enough in a kind of appealing way. This is in no small part due to the excellent, firely display by the rhythm section here, as they utterly outdo Larry Mullen Jr and the other twat with a rolling, funky groove that gives the song a genuine undertow of passion and darkness, making Yorke’s ‘I will eat you alive’ at the end darkly seductive as opposed to just silly. ‘We Suck The Young Blood’ is Radiohead attempting a kind of goth cabaret, appealing on paper but more odd then good in practice. The same goes for the intermittently engaging Motown influences cropping up in ‘A Punch Up At A Wedding’. Our heroes liked ‘Optimistic’ so much they rewrote it here as ‘There There’, the album’s somewhat lackluster lead off single. It’s an improvement on the original, but then that’s not really saying much.
After a bit of a lull in the middle, the album gets interesting again towards the end of side 2. ‘Myxomatosis’ is a snarling rocker, with the band all foaming at the mouth and disintegrating before your ears. It’s the most gloriously unhinged thing on the album. ‘Scatterbrain’ is a sweet, delicate song brimming with dark humour – it’s title is literal. ‘Wolf At The Door’ sees Thom Yorke sing-speaking over an elliptical riff in a song that doesn’t really sound like Radiohead at all. It’s a brilliantly off-key way to end the album.
Hail To The Thief is at times brilliant and at times frustrating, sometimes in the same song. For all its warped sonic experiments, the songs don’t ever really offer up a new coherent direction for Radiohead to move in. At the end of the day, this isn’t really a problem – Radiohead’s sonic palette is now wide enough to encompass all these different songs and still sound sonically consistent. If it never feels as radical a departure from the past as Kid A, it’s because its stylistic detours are handled with the grace and subtlety of a band that has well and truly found its feet. Because of this we can easily forgive the odd misstep.
Rating: 8.1
In Rainbows (2007)
In Rainbows is the only Radiohead record I hadn’t listened to previously before writing this article. As such it’s the record I’ve had the least time to live with. However I feel it might be my favourite record they’ve done in the last decade. It’s certainly the most consistent album they’ve released since OK Computer, and it sees them finally nailing the balance between warped, everything but the kitchen sink experimentation and their natural way with a melody.
The very presence of ‘Nude’ should feel like something of an ass pull, seeing as the song’s been hanging around as a live favourite since the OK Computer days, but when the end result is as shimmering and gorgeous as this, it’s hard to complain too much. It really is a fantastic track, all swooning strings and Thom Yorke’s delicate falsetto crooning, matched to some nifty 50s sci fi keyboard effects. ‘Weird Fishes/Arpeggi’ is a wonderful piece of modern prog, interlocking sections of cyclical guitar and keyboard. They even get away with some almost U2-esque vocals at the climax, until it switches into a spaced out krautrock groove for the finale. I assume that’s the ‘Arpeggi’ bit though I really don’t know why. ‘All I Need’ is a sensual slow burner, with vibraphone and wonky droning keyboards, (and ‘I’m an animal / Trapped in your hot car’ is a pleasingly surreal come-on), and ‘Faust Arp’ has an almost poppy melody wrapped in its complex arrangement. ‘House Of Cards’ wryly paraphrases a crappy old pop song in its opening lines and gets away with it thanks to its gentle arrangement and lush melody. ‘Reckoner’ is another slowburning epic, and ‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place’ is driven by kinetic drum and bass lines under a writhing, bluesy acoustic guitar part. ‘Videotape’ is a lovely, blurred closing track. Elegiac and sinister, it builds up from just Yorke’s voice and piano to a gloriously oblique finale, drums rolling like distant thunder underneath dreamlike clouds.
Again the album is not quite perfect. Opener ’15 Step’ (where are they getting these titles?) is engagingly odd, but not much besides that. It does suggest that eventually, if they keep plugging away at the electronica tracks they might wind up somewhere interesting, but it’s still not clear if it will be worth all the time and awkwardness. ‘Bodysnatchers’ charted higher then any Radiohead single since ‘Creep’, though listening to the song the thought occurs that it probably managed that through luck more then quality or pop appeal. The song aims for exciting and messy but just hits messy. The bonus disc continues in much the same vein as the album proper, and the two actually blend into each other rather nicely, even if the songs on the second disc don’t give the impression of going anywhere.
In Rainbows really is remarkably assured. It contains many of Radiohead’s most successful experiments and most gorgeous songs. While the material shows just how far out Radiohead can go, it also demonstrates just how canny they are with a good tune. At this stage I feel we ought to know what to expect from Radiohead, but on the strength of this album I’m not so sure. Hopefully they can keep up this balance of the boldly experimental and the effortlessly melodic for some time to come.
Rating: 8.7
Conclusion
Like my similar article on The Smiths, I originally started this piece wanting to give Radiohead much more of a kicking, but at the end of the day I found the music ultimately means too much for me to do that. I have to confess that I really enjoyed returning to all of these albums. Even the thoroughly crappy Pablo Honey retains some nostalgic charm for me, and I’d forgotten just how good a lot of Radiohead’s best material is. In particular I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of Hail To The Thief, and it was nice to finally get around to hearing In Rainbows, which I’m glad I was able to do away from all the hype. In my introduction, I take Radiohead to task for their negative influence on modern indie rock. While it’s unfair to praise or shoot the parents for the sins of the children, it’s something that inevitably happens quite a bit in the world of music criticism. And if we have Radiohead to blame for Muse and Coldplay, it also strikes me that we have them to thank at least partially for Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors. It’s possible to hear the influence of Radiohead’s latter work on many of the more interesting and daringly experimental bands, in their post-everything, all channels open approach and also in their refreshing lack of concern about apparent coolness. Even in the cases where they didn’t act as direct influences, Radiohead almost certainly opened up the headspace of 2000s indie rock, making the audience more ready to listen to and accept other people’s innovations.
Returning to their music, it really is remarkable how much they’ve matured over the years. In a market that specializes in churning out the same thing over and over again, Radiohead have never been content to rest on their laurels, and each new release sees them expanding not only their sound but also their outlook on life. Hail To The Thief and In Rainbows in particular are refreshingly free of the misery and angst that they are so well known for. Even back in the days of The Bends, they were tempering their navel-gazing tendencies with a wry sense of humour and self awareness, and their music is all the better for it.
As to the question of Radiohead’s originality, they have their influences sure, and sometimes they wind up sinking under the historical weight of them. But Radiohead have proven that they can stand on their own to feet, and these days their best material sounds like no one but themselves, as they coherently mould all their disparate musical sources into a compelling whole. They will never beat the krautrockers or Warp Records at their own game, but it’s enough that they play their own game very well.
Comparing Radiohead to the two other bands put in similar position reveals a lot to their credit. Rather then being sickeningly populist and earnest like U2 and REM, or loosing what made people interested in their music in the first place, like REM, Radiohead have simply continued to follow their muse down whatever path it leads them. There are certainly worse bands we could have at the top. And I for one am glad that we have them.
Where do I stand? Good question. I consider myself a lapsed Radiohead fan. I heard Pablo Honey and The Bends at an impressionable age, and they were one of the few modern bands that made a mark on my prog-addled teenage brain. I remember hearing OK Computer, Kid A and Amnesiac later, after all three had come out, and being impressed that the post-grunge band from the first two albums had changed so much, but finding the latter two distinctly unmemorable. To stop this from morphing into a life story, I eventually became a much bigger fan, only to find my affection cooling off later. I’m pretty sure some of this is a reaction to the hype – so much intensive information and discussion about music only serves to dull its magic in your mind. However, I’m not sure that’s entirely it. I don’t argue with Radiohead haters in music arguments because, to a certain extent, I see their point and even kind of agree with it.
I don’t think Radiohead overintellectualise rock, I think that’s a load of nonsense. No artist should be bound by other people’s preconceptions of what they should or should not be doing. Also, in this world we are cursed by Radiohead’s vastly VASTLY inferior mirror universe copies Muse and Coldplay, who actually both emphasise Radiohead’s own strengths quite nicely. Muse’s stodgy and sonically ugly schmindie rock and Coldplay’s horrifically bland U2-isms not only vindicate Radiohead’s choice to follow a more interesting path after the success of The Bends and OK Computer but also show how damn good Radiohead were at schmindie rock and bland U2-isms before they got bored with them.
However, none of Radiohead’s albums are consistently brilliant, even the admittedly excellent OK Computer. And, for all their vaunted pushing of the envelope, there’s nothing radically new in OK Computer, Kid A or Amnesiac. The surprising thing is that they came from a fairly competent rock band and the latter two sold impressively for what they are. Which is a user-friendly rehash of experimental rock down the years. Many of these ideas were pretty old by the time Radiohead got to them – Pink Floyd and krautrock leave their fingerprints over both records – and many of them aren’t even from particularly obscure sources. Sure, there’s the odd shout out to Faust, but Floyd were and are hugely popular. Radiohead were beaten to the punch in exhuming Pink Floyd and Genesis by Marillion, whose excellent Brave is surely an influence on OK Computer, with its spooky ambience derived from a haunted castle and its premillenial dread pre-empting Radiohead’s effort by a number of years, and the end result is much more generous spirited as well. Other more modern influences, from Sigur Ros to the entire 90s output of Warp Records, may have been a bit closer to the cutting edge, but still were hardly old news and actually sold reasonable amounts. While Kid A was intended to be alienating on first lesson, it’s not as if Radiohead dropped their listeners entirely in the deep end.
But, perhaps more importantly, there is something very worthy and po-faced about Radiohead’s music, which maybe stems from their angst-fuelled early days in the aftermath of grunge. They make serious art, dammit. Look at many of their (more adventurous) sonic sources though, and you will see bands with much more of a sense of humour. From Faust to Aphex Twin, the best experimental music is able to be fun and engaging whilst pushing the boundaries. And for all their moping, Radiohead are unable to summon the bleak, frightening austerity that makes records like The Marble Index and Closer so bracing. At the end of the day, for all their risk-taking, there is still something incredibly white bread about Radiohead.
Enough on the rhetoric. How do I actually feel about Radiohead’s actual music? I don’t know. It’s been ages since I’ve been able to listen to them. The thought occurred to me that being here in Costa Rica is as far away as I’m likely to get from Radiohead, so this is an excellent time to revisit their albums away from all the noise, and try to assess them fairly and objectively. And then give each one a crass Pitchfork rating out of 10.0. I am genuinely curious to find out what I make of the music now. I have decided that I will listen to all their studio albums, including frakking Pablo Honey, as well as the officially released live album I Might Be Wrong. I’m not going to delve into Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood’s solo albums here, as they don’t have quite the cultural cachet that their day job has, so my opinion of them is less likely to be influenced by all the hype if I ever get round to hearing them. I have also decided not to listen to all of Radiohead’s B-sides or any compilations thereof. However, I will be talking about the odd B-side in between albums when appropriate, largely because two of my favourite ever Radiohead tracks are B-sides and I have nowhere else to cram them in. In my review of In Rainbows, I will ignore the way the record was released, and judge it entirely on the merit of the music itself, which is what all the idiots who reviewed it at the time should have done. But while I’m here, I may as well point out that I thought the whole thing was a cynical attempt to get attention and ultimately get the fans who care about the band the most to pay twice for the same thing. Bands as diverse as Marillion, Coil, Einsturzende Neubauten and Ghost Box records have been using the internet for most of this decade in increasingly innovative ways without making such a bloody fuss. You can still download Marillion’s excellent Happiness Is The Road from their website free of charge, long after Radiohead took down In Rainbows and replaced it with the traditional paying version. Lastly, I’m magnanimously going to spare Radiohead the utter embarrassment of dredging up the execrable ‘Pop Is Dead’, because I’m such a nice guy.
Onward to the reviews! But first: ahahahahahahaha, ‘Pop Is Dead’ is so shit! OK done now.
Pablo Honey (1993)
And so the Radiohead story starts not with a bang, but with a whimper. Pablo Honey is infamously not very good, and perhaps the only surprise here is just how poor the debut of one of the most widely respected bands in the world now is. But then again, perhaps part of Radiohead’s appeal stems from the fact that instead of arriving fully formed, they started off rough and ready and drastically improved.
Amongst the daft things frequently written about this band is the epithet ‘last’ – Radiohead are the last great guitar band, the last band to really matter and so on. Palpably rubbish, but in one way it makes sense, at least for now – any band around today who released an album this uninspiring would be lucky to be allowed the time and funding to develop into something better. Radiohead’s get out of the scrapyard free card was, of course, minor indie hit ‘Creep’. Listening to it today, you’re reminded why it became a hit in the first place and why you never want to hear the damn song ever again. As a whole, the album is firmly rooted in its time. In 1993, Simon Reynolds used the term ‘post rock’ to describe a movement in music that Radiohead would later be associated with, but there’s no sign whatsoever of that on this recod. Instead we get grungey alternative rock. It’s a genre that has yet to really have a hipster revival, and really that’s for the best, because by and large it just wasn’t really any good.
While in retrospect it’s kind of interesting to hear the defining features of Radiohead’s sound – Johnny Greenwood’s guitar and Thom Yorke’s voice – in their nascent form, both sound decidedly unformed and unsure of their own strengths. The music is a mix of fairly standard alt-rock influences – the most prominent being stadium-era REM and U2, and of course Nirvana – but it rarely coalesces into anything individual or interesting. The exceptions are ‘You’, a hard rocker that builds up from delicate guitar picking and hints at where the band would go next, and ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’, a compelling mess of Sonic Youth-esque guitar nailed to a snarky lyric.
The rest of the album drones by in a haze of angsty awkwardness. Radiohead have three guitarists, which always seems on paper somewhat redundant, and though later on they would figure out a sensible way to orchestrate them, here they just obfusticate and cloud up the already muddy and confused songs. ‘Thinking About You’ is vaguely memorable for being the first showing of the band’s gentler, acoustic side, though lyrics equating masturbation with self-loathing can’t quite raise the song into genuinely good territory. ‘Stop Whispering’ betrays the band’s Pixies influence, though the band’s lackluster musicianship and uninspiring writing make the comparison a decidedly unfavourable one. ‘Prove Yourself’ is kind of cute and kind of pathetic. The rest of the LP is deplorable, to the extent that you feel embarrassed for the band listening to it, (‘How Do You’ is actually hilariously awful). In particular, the adolescent, angsty lyrics must make Thom Yorke cringe these days. Pablo Honey has never been reassessed by anyone, and, frankly, it’s unlikely to be because it doesn’t deserve it. Listened to today, it’s remarkable how un-Radiohead-like much of the music on Pablo Honey is. Don’t worry, they got better.
Rating: 3.8
The Bends (1995)
The Bends is a remarkable improvement on Radiohead’s debut. It’s far more assured and confident, the music stronger and more coherent. It’s actually a pretty good album. That being said, it’s not quite the unadulterated masterpiece many would have you believe. Exactly half of The Bends is utterly fantastic. Sadly, the other half is less convincing, and sees the band still stumbling over some of the problems that plagued their debut.
The good songs first. The album starts off strong, with ‘Planet Telex’ arriving in a cloud of spacey whooshes and dry ice, with echoplexed guitars and much improved vocals, followed by the title track. The songwriting is much more complex and well realized right off the bat, as are the arrangements, which find time to incorporate weirder, quieter moments amidst the clarified rock punch. ‘The Bends’ takes a well-aimed swipe at Britpop nostalgia, firmly setting the band against all that self-important, retro nationalistic tripe, the fear and self-loathing of the lyrics almost undercut completely by the song’s glorious, anthemic chorus. ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ is still just beautiful, undulled by years of familiarity. A nuanced study of the hollowness of modern life, it swells up from an acoustic beginning to a grand climax, and shows just how inventive Radiohead were becoming with their arrangements – the texture of the song morphs subtly through spacey keyboards to full on guitar rock. ‘Black Star’ is a far better rewrite of ‘More Than A Feeling’ then ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ ever was, replete with twinkling guitar fade in and mellow harmonies contrasted against a brutal crunching guitar riff. ‘Just’ sees self-loathing from the other side with a snarling guitar line derived from Magazine’s ‘Shot By Both Sides’, and has some very nifty guitar work. Nocturnal closer ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’ is a thing of limpid wonder, with its cyclical guitar riff perfectly complementing the blurred, dreamlike shifts between nightmare and dream in the lyrics.
These songs alone make The Bends more then worth your while, but unfortunately, that’s only half the story. The rest of the songs are not so strong. While there’s little here that’s outright embarrassing, (though ‘Nice Dream’ comes close), there’s also very little that’s up to much. Radiohead’s songwriting was still letting them down. ‘My Iron Lung’ is a compelling song with a cool guitar riff, until the band completely lose the plot with an almost comically bad heavy section. ‘Sulk’ is utterly forgettable and ‘Bones’ is a clumsy mess. Another problem is the horrible guitar sound that the band seem to favour on their first two albums: not noisy enough to be truly bracing and lacking enough low end to give the sound definition, the end result is an indeterminate, heavy yet curiously limp sounding mess. The real surprise here is how poor Radiohead’s gentler, less rocky songs are. ‘High and Dry’, ‘Nice Dream’ and ‘Bullet Proof… I Wish I Was’ are all horrifically bland and approach U2-esque levels of crassness and painful sincerity. They really don’t suggest at all how well Radiohead would manage once they ditched their alt-rock tendencies.
Another thing I feel I must mention at this juncture is Radiohead’s lyrics. Thom Yorke trades in vagueness and inscrutability. When this works, it works very well, creating an underlying sense of paranoia or dread that’s never specifically pinned down, allowing the listener’s imagination to fill in the blanks, and Yorke would eventually wind up very good at this indeed. However, at this stage, there are many cases where it simply doesn’t work – Yorke sounds like he really is singing about nothing, or else nails together a phrase so gutwrenchingly clumsy it wrecks the entire mood of the song. ‘Now I can’t climb the stairs/ Pieces missing everywhere….’ Sometimes it sounds like he isn’t even trying. Or trying too hard and failing. There are many such examples on the album, ‘Nice Dream’ is particularly bad.
So, while The Bends is a definite step up from Pablo Honey and marks Radiohead’s first step on the trail towards greatness, the band still encounter teething troubles on the way. Its good songs are often great, but its poor songs are often very poor indeed, and The Bends doesn’t quite manage to stand up by itself as a truly great LP. However, there is magic to be found in its grooves for sure, and they were getting there.
Rating: 6.7
‘Bishop’s Robes’/‘Talk Show Host’ (1996)
They were getting there very fast indeed. These two B-sides from the ‘Street Spirit’ single show that by the next year, Radiohead were leaving The Bends behind full speed and gearing up to make their masterpiece. Both of these songs could have sat on The Bends, and while they would have wrecked the flow of the album completely, they would have sat happily with the album’s best songs. ‘Bishop’s Robes’ is a glorious, string-laden ballad of the type Coldplay wish they could write. ‘I am not going back,’ sings Yorke wistfully at the chorus as he gives Oxford a quietly brutal kiss-off. If ‘Bishop’s Robes’ anticipates OK Computer’s melodic grandeur, then ‘Talk Show Host’ marks out Radiohead’s path afterwards. Twinkling keyboards and Yorke’s paranoid yelping are repeatedly undercut by a monstrous bassline and breakbeats copped straight form The Happy Mondays copping Can. Truly a thing of twisted beauty, and one of my favourite Radiohead songs.
NOTE: From this point onwards, all of Radiohead’s studio albums suffer from lousy mastering. I don’t want to talk about this at great length here, but if you master and album entirely in the red it removes all the dynamics, makes the instruments not sound like real instruments and makes the whole thing unpleasant to listen to. Radiohead’s albums certainly aren’t the worst mastered out there, but it is noticeable, and it does effect my enjoyment of this on the whole very good music. All these albums deserve better then that.
OK Computer (1997)
Apres ca, le deluge. After this album, in the eyes of the world Radiohead could do no wrong. And as much as the wind up merchant in me hates this, it’s hard to deny the quality of this fantastic record. Certainly it remains Radiohead’s greatest achievement, the perfect blend of mature songwriting and sonic experimentation. Calling it the greatest album of all time is ridiculous, but it doesn’t stop OK Computer from being a really good LP.
The album storms in on a guitar riff copped from the middle section of ‘Red’ by King Crimson, all thundering break beats and shimmering guitar, as it races to rip through Magazine’s ‘Recoil’ in the coda. This is where the prog comparisons started in earnest, and it actually is a little deserved. ‘Paranoid Android’ adroitly navigates through three seemingly unrelated musical sections to create a coherent whole, ‘Exit Music (For A Film)’ features mellotron, and the whole album flows together so well the band would forever be fighting off accusations that it’s a concept album. The comparison most frequently made is to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon, which shares the album’s vague theme of the way the evils of society slowly drive you insane, but the album has an even more recent precedence in Marillion’s excellent Brave, and the two albums share a similar sound and musical ambition. Both albums also go to the brink of despair to find redemption and a new love of life at the end. OK Computer is positively dripping with alienation – to the extent that the extraterrestrials seem like a friendly alternative on ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ – but the album opens and closes with the image of a person walking out of a potentially fatal accident simply happy to still be alive. You can practically see Thom Yorke’s grin as he sings, ‘In an interstellar burst I am back to save the universe’ on ‘Airbag’, perfectly capturing the change of perspective forced on you by a brush with death. ‘Lucky’, at the other end of the album, is less outspoken about its joy but more profoundly moving for it. Possibly Radiohead’s single greatest track, ‘Lucky’ is quietly content to rise above all the bullshit in the world and serenely wait for the waters to subside, knowing that the important things will still be there. ‘The head of state has called for me by name / But I don’t have time for him…’ The song rises from delicate guitar effects and ghostly keyboards, through a fantastic Johnny Greenwood guitar breakdown all to leave the listener hanging on an interrupted cadence.
There is a deep vein of melancholy running through many of these tracks, particularly on the brutal, wounded ‘Exit Music (For A Film)’, which ends with Yorke murmuring brokenly, ‘We hope that you choke’, all aggression spent, all hope gone. ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ and ‘No Surprises’ both yearn for any sort of escape, however unlikely or horrific, from the crushingly mundane. However the album is not without humour, particularly on the justly iconic ‘Karma Police’. In the age of Oasis, Radiohead show you how to rip off a Beatles song (in this case ‘Sexy Sadie’) and come out looking intelligent on the other side. The lyrics call out for the Karma Police to come and arrest various unpleasant characters in an increasingly hysterical tone – it’s chorus of ‘This is what you’ll get / If you mess with us’ makes me think of Pink’s vile rant towards the end of The Wall – before the glorious coda reveals the whole set up to be a joke. Radiohead’s rhythm section, sometimes wondrous, sometimes a liability, shine particularly brightly here. Indeed their parts for the coda could almost be from a jazz standard, with the gentle, rolling drum fills and walking bass line. ‘Climbing Up The Walls’ almost resurrects Bauhaus for some tongue in cheek gothic horror, and ‘Electioneering’ is a coruscating, sneering attack against slimy politicians, and the first real sign of Radiohead’s political awareness on record.
Sadly the record just falls short of perfection. Much noise has been made about ‘Fitter Happier’, which, while it’s pretentious, is so short that it’s not really any sort of a problem. More damaging are ‘Let Down’, the dying echoes of Radiohead’s U2 influence coupled to some truly cringe-worthy lyrics, and ‘The Tourist’, the uneventful Johnny Greenwood song faced with the unenviable task of following ‘Lucky’ and closing the LP. However these are minor gripes on what is a very good record indeed. If Radiohead are unlikely to release anything ever as good again, neither are that many other bands. Greatest album of all time? Not by a long shot. Greatest album of the decade? Not even close. Bloody marvelous? You bet.
Rating: 9.2
Kid A (2000)
Inevitably this album was subject to ridiculous amounts of analysis on its original release, but I don’t really want to talk about that here. Hindsight allows us to look at Kid A as a transitional album rather then an end in itself, and as Radiohead advance on and on, this viewpoint makes more and more sense. It’s not that Kid A is a bad album – like The Bends, half of it is very good indeed. The album sounds like a band desperately trying to distance themselves from their previous album, and only partially succeeding.
Kid A makes a big song and dance about how different it is from OK Computer, but at the end of the day it’s not as if Radiohead went and released Metal Machine Music. Kid A is still identifiably a Radiohead album. Hell, many of the songs still have guitar and Thom Yorke’s unprocessed voice. In retrospect it’s a little surprising that it caused quite so much fan outrage. ‘How To Disappear Completely’ is a limpid aching ballad that could have easily fit on OK Computer, though it succeeds in being more depressing then anything on that album.
If OK Computer gets labeled prog, Kid A gets labeled post-rock. In some ways you can see what people are talking about, as the band was taking its experiments integrating rock with electronics to further, more leftfield extremes. ‘Everything In Its Right Place’, still one of Radiohead’s greatest songs, opens the album on an incredibly strong note. Like Sigur Ros if they were any good, the song is a hallucinatory swirl of keyboards and Yorke’s echoing, cut up vocals, turning his oblique lyrics into a kind of mantra. ‘The National Anthem’ is another top moment for the Radiohead rhythm section, all pounding drums and idiot bassline as all chaos breaks out over the top. The 5/4 time signature throws the whole band, but ‘Morning Bell’ is still an incredible song, with its melodic bass line and soaring melody hiding some truly disturbing lyrics, until the song breaks down halfway through and Yorke is left muttering to himself like a psychopath. ‘Idioteque’ truly is a thing of wonder, all glitching beats and wobbling keyboards while Thom Yorke’s paranoid rant about communication technology and government surveillance seems more and more chilling with each passing day. If you’re stuck in Britain, hahaha.
Unfortunately, not all of Kid A is an unqualified success. ‘Kid A’ is a poor Aphex Twin retread, and ‘Treefingers’ is nothing that Eno or Cluster didn’t do loads better in the early 70s. These tracks have all the hip post-rock influences of krautrock and electronica but unlike ‘Idioteque’ or ‘National Anthem’, they fail to do anything interesting with them, and the end result is self conscious and uninspiring. Not all of Kid A fails because Radiohead’s ambition overshoots itself either. ‘Optimistic’ is a dull, droning guitar lead song that is simply lacks the necessary guitar distortion to fit on side two of Pablo Honey. ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ opens off threatening to be an awesome Nico rip off, but simply peters out into nothingness, to pointlessly return in a cloud of confusing before slouching off again. I actually spent ages with the guitar tab of ‘In Limbo’ trying to find out if anything was actually happening in the song, because its very elusiveness fascinated me. Turns out it’s just a really boring song.
In a strange way, Kid A resembles The Bends more then any other Radiohead album. Once again, Radiohead felt the need to distance themselves from their past. Both albums see the band struggling against the boundaries of their previous work whilst containing hints of the rewards this struggle would eventually reap. As a result, Kid A is a far from coherent album, but it does contain some top drawer material, and its experiments allowed Radiohead to advance to the next stage in their musical journey.
Rating: 6.9
Amnesiac (2001)
Although a collection of offcuts from the Kid A sessions, Amnesiac is easily the superior LP. I think at this early stage, Radiohead wanted their transformation to appear more radical then it was, and so wound up second guessing themselves and putting out weaker material first in an effort to be weirder. With the benefit of hindsight, the connection between OK Computer’s sonic experiments – basically rebooting prog with electronica and post punk influences – runs through to Kid A and Amnesiac’s most interesting moments, and the more self consciously ‘experimental’ moments come off as more conservative because of how closely they ape their source material. In retrospect, the 12 track album they should have released in 2000 goes something like this:
Radiohead – Amnesiac Kid Is Wrong
Packt Like Sardines In A Crushed Tin Box
Pyramid Song
National Anthem (I Might Be Wrong Live version)
You And Whose Army
I Might Be Wrong
Knives Out
Morning Bell (I Might Be Wrong Live version)
How To Disappear Completely
Idioteque (I Might Be Wrong Live version)
Like Spinning Plates (I Might Be Wrong Live version)
Everything In Its Right Place
Life In A Glass House
See? Most of it’s Amnesiac, cause it’s a better, and better sequenced, album. Your welcome Nigel Godrich.
Anyway. The album starts off with another great Radiohead opener, ‘Packt Like Sardines…’, in which Yorke and the beat stutter across each other, the song’s protagonist driven to paranoid breakdown. ‘Pyramid Song’ is a gloriously daft choice for a single, an Egyptian death mantra set against an oblique piano line whose alien geometry would have HPL running for cover. ‘You And Whose Army’ lyrically mirrors the bunker mentality of ‘Talk Show Host’, switching from a bluesy croon to a full band march of defiance. ‘Knives Out’ could have happily sat on OK Computer, with its mesh of guitar lines and straightforward chorus. ‘Dollars And Cents’ is a dark, warped mess of krautrock and electronica which is genuinely compelling, as Thom Yorke turns himself into the information running through networks. I feel genuinely bad about leaving it off the above tracklist, but I suppose it could have been an awesome B-side.
Above all, Amnesiac proves that Radiohead’s strength comes from their openness to all sonic possibilities. Whereas Kid A sounds hermetically sealed in from the rest of the world, Amnesiac’s best moments steal from everything from krautrock and electronica through to blues and wonky jazz. Indeed, this is seen clearly in some of the album’s best tracks. ‘I Might Be Wrong’ is a bluesy, almost Stones-like grove overlayered with interlocking riffs and thudding electronic percussion, which all drains away for a glorious acoustic guitar break. ‘Life In A Glass House’, Radiohead’s most satisfying album closer since ‘Street Spirit’, is even more bizarre, a collaboration with jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton, which successfully nails Yorke’s paranoia to a woozy, almost drunk horn section. It shows just how far out Radiohead’s music can get without loosing any of its signature qualities.
This time round, the only songs that don’t work are the pointless ‘Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors’, actually a more interesting experiment in punctuation then in music, the slight ‘Hunting Bears’ and ‘Like Spinning Plates’, whose mix of backwards vocals, churning chords and electronics never quite coalesces into anything coherent. Also, ‘Morning Bell’ is reprised, inexplicably turned into a rather dull 4/4 ballad. But for the most part, Amnesiac is a powerful and fully realized album, the sound of a band confidently exploring new waters and becoming accustomed to its natural voice.
Rating: 8.3
‘Trans-Atlantic Drawl’ (2001)
This little gem wound up being relegated to B-side status, which is a bit of a shame as it really is fantastic. Rocking harder then anything from the Kid A sessions, ‘Trans-Atlantic Drawl’ hits the ground running. Pounding drums, fuzzed out guitar flying off at every angle and a demented playground lyrics of something about magazines, it comes across as Faust playing ‘Kandy Pop’ by Bis, especially as it reaches the chorus, where the fuzz reaches anthemically daft levels. Then, instead of verse two, someone cuts the tape and glues it half way through an exploration of frigid ambient drones. Brilliant.
I Might Be Wrong (2001)
Rather then take my sequencing advice, Radiohead may as well have waited for another year and just put out these live recordings instead, in which every version trumps the studio recording, apart from the muddy rendition of the title track. Forced to just play the songs instead of agonise over arrangements, the songs are stripped of the ever so slightly fussy studio versions’ ponderousness and take on a much more spontaneous and fun feel. Here Radiohead sound mischievous, drugged up, spaced out and muscular.
The album opens stunningly with the all-time classic version of ‘National Anthem’ riding in on a wave of static. The great thing about the original is that it’s basically just that riff, you can do what you like with it, and the band proceed to do just that. Overlaid with radio static, wooshy keyboards and spacey guitars, the song takes on a cosmic element only hinted at by the somewhat clinical studio version. The rhythm section is tight, brutal and focused, and Yorke’s vocals, as opposed to being processed to hell, are breathless and excited. ‘I Might Be Wrong’ is poorly recorded and not as exciting as it should be, lacking the subtle shade and build up of the original, but it still retains a murky charm. ‘Morning Bell’ is stunning, the playing here simultaneously more passionate and more focused then the original, with Yorke working himself into a frenzy during the coda. The band’s command of dynamics here is fantastic, as the guitars rise to a storm only for everything to suddenly cut back to menacing quiet. ‘Idioteque’ similarly benefits from a more immediate arrangement, the contrast of the band’s impassioned playing and the brutally mechanical electronics creating a tension entirely appropriate to the song’s lyrics. The result is a piece of electronic-tinged krautrock dance mash-up that anticipates LCD Soundsystem. ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ gets expanded into a sea of languid atmospherics, taking on an almost lullaby-like purity. It even starts off with Yorke singing, ‘Here comes the flood’, a shout out to Peter Gabriel surely. ‘Dollars And Cents’ becomes the dark cyberpunk nightmare it was always meant to be, with some particularly adroit drumming, and the delicate acoustic song ‘True Love Waits’ shows the band can still write conventional songs when they feel like it. But special mention must go to Amnesiac filler ‘Like Spinning Plates’, which, shorn of its messy backwards tape arrangement, becomes a glorious, proggy epic building effortlessly to an emotional peak.
Far more then simply a market filler in between studio works, I Might Be Wrong actually works out as Radiohead’s most satisfying post-OK Computer album. It’s to the point, deadly focused and shows off the sheer range and potential of the band’s new musical direction. At the end of the day, when forced to stand on their own two feet, this era of Radiohead prove that they’re an experimental force to be reckoned with, and a kick-ass rock band to boot.
Rating: 8.5
Hail To The Thief (2003)
If such a thing as an underrated Radiohead album is possible, then Hail To The Thief is it. Following on from the fawning admiration heaped on Kid A and its companion releases, perhaps the album simply lacks the shock value of those releases. Certainly, there are few surprises here in terms of content – the songs that integrate experimental textures into Radiohead’s standard bag of tricks work, the glitch experiments don’t. It doesn’t help that much of the fan base had patiently put up with Kid A and Amnesiac and was hoping for a return to standard alt-rock, which needless to say it didn’t get. It also doesn’t help that Hail To The Thief looks like someone taking the piss out of a Radiohead album, with its cover of a twisted alien landscape made up of bricks containing scary buzz words, the clunky political reference of the title, and each song’s portentous/pretentious subtitle, a trick not seen in a mainstream rock record since Yes’ Tales From Topographic Oceans. (‘Softly Open Our Mouths In The Cold’ and ‘Brush The Cobwebs Out Of The Sky’ are pretentious and vague enough to be Mew track names. Urgh.)
Which is actually a shame, as Hail To The Thief is bloody brilliant really, and at times equals and even surpasses its immediate predecessors. The two opening songs in particular are absolute Radiohead classics. The sort-of title track ‘2 + 2 = 5’ manages not to sink into anvilicious preaching despite its self-conscious Orwell reference, and instead its comparison of Bush and Blair to Chicken Little is a surprisingly effective way of calling them out over their handling of the truth during the Iraq war. Musically it opens with delicate guitar arpeggios before switching unexpectedly into an intense rocker, Yorke spitting ‘You have not been paying attention!’. The band sound more fired up then they have in the studio since OK Computer, but without loosing any of their experimental tendencies, as the next track so effortlessly proves. ‘Sit Down. Stand Up’ (punctuation trouble again) again manages to switch between wildly contrasting moods and timbres without missing a beat. This time, eerie strings and mournful vocals give way to an electric storm and massed, idiot chanting of ‘The raindrops/The raindrops/The raindrops…’ over and over again. If the whole album kept up this pace, it would be a stone cold classic.
Perhaps inevitably the pace drops. ‘Sail To The Moon’ is pleasant but forgettable, the setting that a lot of Radiohead’s ballads seem automatically set for these days. Then we have the inevitable electronica experiment, ‘Backdrifts’, which works about as well as you’d expect. To Radiohead’s credit, they seem to have realized that straight up ripping off Aphex Twin doesn’t work for them, so this time round Yorke’s voice is unprocessed, and pools of acoustic guitar are added to the mix. As a result it sounds less derivative and more like a Radiohead song, but sadly still not a very good Radiohead song. They repeat the whole exercise again a few songs later with ‘The Gloaming’, to equally inconsequential results. ‘Go To Sleep’ is another winner though, all sweeping guitar lines and a bleepy malfunctioning robot solo at the end. ‘Where I End And You Begin’ sees the band exhuming their U2 influence, but oddly enough in a kind of appealing way. This is in no small part due to the excellent, firely display by the rhythm section here, as they utterly outdo Larry Mullen Jr and the other twat with a rolling, funky groove that gives the song a genuine undertow of passion and darkness, making Yorke’s ‘I will eat you alive’ at the end darkly seductive as opposed to just silly. ‘We Suck The Young Blood’ is Radiohead attempting a kind of goth cabaret, appealing on paper but more odd then good in practice. The same goes for the intermittently engaging Motown influences cropping up in ‘A Punch Up At A Wedding’. Our heroes liked ‘Optimistic’ so much they rewrote it here as ‘There There’, the album’s somewhat lackluster lead off single. It’s an improvement on the original, but then that’s not really saying much.
After a bit of a lull in the middle, the album gets interesting again towards the end of side 2. ‘Myxomatosis’ is a snarling rocker, with the band all foaming at the mouth and disintegrating before your ears. It’s the most gloriously unhinged thing on the album. ‘Scatterbrain’ is a sweet, delicate song brimming with dark humour – it’s title is literal. ‘Wolf At The Door’ sees Thom Yorke sing-speaking over an elliptical riff in a song that doesn’t really sound like Radiohead at all. It’s a brilliantly off-key way to end the album.
Hail To The Thief is at times brilliant and at times frustrating, sometimes in the same song. For all its warped sonic experiments, the songs don’t ever really offer up a new coherent direction for Radiohead to move in. At the end of the day, this isn’t really a problem – Radiohead’s sonic palette is now wide enough to encompass all these different songs and still sound sonically consistent. If it never feels as radical a departure from the past as Kid A, it’s because its stylistic detours are handled with the grace and subtlety of a band that has well and truly found its feet. Because of this we can easily forgive the odd misstep.
Rating: 8.1
In Rainbows (2007)
In Rainbows is the only Radiohead record I hadn’t listened to previously before writing this article. As such it’s the record I’ve had the least time to live with. However I feel it might be my favourite record they’ve done in the last decade. It’s certainly the most consistent album they’ve released since OK Computer, and it sees them finally nailing the balance between warped, everything but the kitchen sink experimentation and their natural way with a melody.
The very presence of ‘Nude’ should feel like something of an ass pull, seeing as the song’s been hanging around as a live favourite since the OK Computer days, but when the end result is as shimmering and gorgeous as this, it’s hard to complain too much. It really is a fantastic track, all swooning strings and Thom Yorke’s delicate falsetto crooning, matched to some nifty 50s sci fi keyboard effects. ‘Weird Fishes/Arpeggi’ is a wonderful piece of modern prog, interlocking sections of cyclical guitar and keyboard. They even get away with some almost U2-esque vocals at the climax, until it switches into a spaced out krautrock groove for the finale. I assume that’s the ‘Arpeggi’ bit though I really don’t know why. ‘All I Need’ is a sensual slow burner, with vibraphone and wonky droning keyboards, (and ‘I’m an animal / Trapped in your hot car’ is a pleasingly surreal come-on), and ‘Faust Arp’ has an almost poppy melody wrapped in its complex arrangement. ‘House Of Cards’ wryly paraphrases a crappy old pop song in its opening lines and gets away with it thanks to its gentle arrangement and lush melody. ‘Reckoner’ is another slowburning epic, and ‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place’ is driven by kinetic drum and bass lines under a writhing, bluesy acoustic guitar part. ‘Videotape’ is a lovely, blurred closing track. Elegiac and sinister, it builds up from just Yorke’s voice and piano to a gloriously oblique finale, drums rolling like distant thunder underneath dreamlike clouds.
Again the album is not quite perfect. Opener ’15 Step’ (where are they getting these titles?) is engagingly odd, but not much besides that. It does suggest that eventually, if they keep plugging away at the electronica tracks they might wind up somewhere interesting, but it’s still not clear if it will be worth all the time and awkwardness. ‘Bodysnatchers’ charted higher then any Radiohead single since ‘Creep’, though listening to the song the thought occurs that it probably managed that through luck more then quality or pop appeal. The song aims for exciting and messy but just hits messy. The bonus disc continues in much the same vein as the album proper, and the two actually blend into each other rather nicely, even if the songs on the second disc don’t give the impression of going anywhere.
In Rainbows really is remarkably assured. It contains many of Radiohead’s most successful experiments and most gorgeous songs. While the material shows just how far out Radiohead can go, it also demonstrates just how canny they are with a good tune. At this stage I feel we ought to know what to expect from Radiohead, but on the strength of this album I’m not so sure. Hopefully they can keep up this balance of the boldly experimental and the effortlessly melodic for some time to come.
Rating: 8.7
Conclusion
Like my similar article on The Smiths, I originally started this piece wanting to give Radiohead much more of a kicking, but at the end of the day I found the music ultimately means too much for me to do that. I have to confess that I really enjoyed returning to all of these albums. Even the thoroughly crappy Pablo Honey retains some nostalgic charm for me, and I’d forgotten just how good a lot of Radiohead’s best material is. In particular I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of Hail To The Thief, and it was nice to finally get around to hearing In Rainbows, which I’m glad I was able to do away from all the hype. In my introduction, I take Radiohead to task for their negative influence on modern indie rock. While it’s unfair to praise or shoot the parents for the sins of the children, it’s something that inevitably happens quite a bit in the world of music criticism. And if we have Radiohead to blame for Muse and Coldplay, it also strikes me that we have them to thank at least partially for Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors. It’s possible to hear the influence of Radiohead’s latter work on many of the more interesting and daringly experimental bands, in their post-everything, all channels open approach and also in their refreshing lack of concern about apparent coolness. Even in the cases where they didn’t act as direct influences, Radiohead almost certainly opened up the headspace of 2000s indie rock, making the audience more ready to listen to and accept other people’s innovations.
Returning to their music, it really is remarkable how much they’ve matured over the years. In a market that specializes in churning out the same thing over and over again, Radiohead have never been content to rest on their laurels, and each new release sees them expanding not only their sound but also their outlook on life. Hail To The Thief and In Rainbows in particular are refreshingly free of the misery and angst that they are so well known for. Even back in the days of The Bends, they were tempering their navel-gazing tendencies with a wry sense of humour and self awareness, and their music is all the better for it.
As to the question of Radiohead’s originality, they have their influences sure, and sometimes they wind up sinking under the historical weight of them. But Radiohead have proven that they can stand on their own to feet, and these days their best material sounds like no one but themselves, as they coherently mould all their disparate musical sources into a compelling whole. They will never beat the krautrockers or Warp Records at their own game, but it’s enough that they play their own game very well.
Comparing Radiohead to the two other bands put in similar position reveals a lot to their credit. Rather then being sickeningly populist and earnest like U2 and REM, or loosing what made people interested in their music in the first place, like REM, Radiohead have simply continued to follow their muse down whatever path it leads them. There are certainly worse bands we could have at the top. And I for one am glad that we have them.
posted by Jonathan Thornton at 12:05 am
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