Radiohead
Amnesiac
[Capitol]
Rating: 9.0
After months of waiting, and several tentative release dates, Amnesiac
finally hit store shelves last Tuesday. Since last October, we've been
hearing that this album, recorded during the same sessions as last year's
wildly experimental Kid A, would serve as a return to the band's
mid-90's roots. Now we come to find it was all a lie.
Not that it gets me down. As far as I'm concerned, Kid A is Radiohead's
defining achievement. A total departure from the conventional rock formats of
OK Computer and The Bends, Kid A drew from far more
abstract and obscure influences than its predecessors. Whereas previous
outings captured echoes of U2 and Pink Floyd, Kid A took what it could
use from the Talking Heads, Can, Talk Talk, and modern-day IDM artists, and
combined it with Radiohead's irrepressible originality and sparkling, alien
production. Whether you liked the end result or not, the fact that they had
the balls to challenge mainstream insipidness with such heroic creativity
was admirable.
That said, Amnesiac is about as close to The Bends as Miss
Cleo is to Jamaican. And within the first ten seconds of its opening track,
"Packt like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box," the band crushes that rumor
like a bug in the ground. Sparse, clanging percussion evokes abandoned
swingsets. Keyboards whir to sonorous life, humming resonantly. Guitars are
curiously marked absent. Production-wise, the track could have nestled cozily
alongside Kid A's strangest moments, yet its melody is stunningly more
infectious than even that album's height of accessibility, "Optimistic."
Amidst chattering synths and twisted metal, Thom Yorke casually insists that
he's "a reasonable man," and politely intones the album's most quoted lyric:
"Get off my case."
The clattering, confrontational "Packt" segues awkwardly into "Pyramid Song,"
a sweeping piano-and-strings ballad, whose unusual timing is difficult to nail
down until Phil Selway's live drums give perspective on the punchdrunk rhythm.
Yorke croons some of his most poetic lyrics since "No Surprises," inspired by
passages from Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. Amidst swelling orchestration
and Satie-esque piano chords, Yorke croons a dream-like scenario in which he's
visited by black-eyed angels, and his past and future loves.
4/4 traditionalists will take an immediate liking to the very OK Computer-ish
"Dollars and Cents," whose lyrical content is strikingly similar to the
anti-government, anti-corporate themes expressed on the 1997 classic. Jonny
Greenwood's minimal, warped guitarwork and distant string arrangements float
celestially over brother Colin's menacing basslines and Selway's delicate
drumming. "Knives Out" is another OK Computer-style reverbathon,
replete with strummed acoustics, chiming electrics, and a not-too-tasteful
rehashing of a prominent guitar line from "Paranoid Android." Great melody.
However, they've fucking used it before. The song also loses points for
containing the line, "Shove it in your mouth." Really, Thom.
Similarly disappointing is "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors." Powered by a gritty
industrial beat, the song's intentional abstractness, for the first time ever,
seems forced and caricatured. Thom's MacinYorke vocal treatments never seemed
terribly groundbreaking, and here, the gimmick has gone utterly limp. Yorke's
lyrical content is also at its most unchallenging, as he educates us on the
many varieties of doors that exist, over oafish, programmed beats worthy of
a Cleopatra Records sampler. Elsewhere, "Hunting Bears" is a two-minute
instrumental clip of aimless guitar noodling that shoots for Neil Young's
Dead Man soundtrack but comes off as a cutrate Wish You Were Here
outtake. A track like this is meant to segue into a related piece of music;
instead, we're flung headfirst into the completely dissimilar "Like Spinning
Plates."
If nothing else, Radiohead have always realized the emotional impact of a
stunning album closer, and Amnesiac offers two. Sitting side by side,
"Like Spinning Plates" and "Life in a Glasshouse" are so vastly superior to
the album's other tracks that the album's few misteps are easily forgiven.
"Spinning Plates," while a much better fit for Kid A, is nonetheless one
of Radiohead's most affecting tracks to date. It opens with a digitally
simulated "spinning" sound, disorienting reversed keyboard, and subtle keyboard
pings. The song hits its peak when Yorke's indecipherable backwards vocals
unexpectedly revert to traditional forward singing during the mournful climax,
"And this just feels like/ Spinning plates/ My body's floating down a muddy
river."
But if "Like Spinning Plates" would have been a fitting apex for Kid A,
"Life in a Glasshouse" is entirely suited to the eclectic Amnesiac.
Rather than creating a unique, Frankensteinian amalgamation from fragments
of other genres, Radiohead instead target a style of music that hasn't been
touched for decades: Edison-era big band. In the process of adapting the
archaic jazz sound to polyrhythmic piano chords and rock lyricism, Radiohead
touch upon an incredibly unique sound that could potentially inspire an
entirely new genre.
"Glasshouse" is most easily (and most often) likened to a New Orleans funeral
dirge-- probably because it's not far off the mark. Largely inspired by Louis
Armstrong's "St James Infirmary," this track is the least like the others on
Amnesiac, and easily the record's winning moment. When, amidst rueful
trombone, tumbling clarinet, and the crushingly emotive trumpet of longtime BBC
session musician Humphrey Lyttelton, Yorke insists, "Of course I'd like to sit
around and chat/ Of course I'd like to stay and chew the fat," and follows it
with a minute of wailing "only, only, only... there's someone listening in,"
the intensity is indescribable.
Despite the heights attained by much of Amnesiac, I prefer Kid
A for a number of reasons. Quality aside, the questionable sequencing of
Amnesiac does little to hush the argument that the record is merely a
thinly veiled b-sides compilation; Kid A played out as a cohesive whole
that evoked panic and paranoia as well as surrealism and disorientation.
Still, Amnesiac's highlights were undeniably worth the wait, and
easily overcome its occasional patchiness. Now if you'll pardon me, I have
to go untie DiCrescenzo.
-Ryan Schreiber