Radiohead: Amnesiac

Amnesiac

Best song: Pyramid Song

Worst song: Hunting Bears

Overall grade: 6

My fiftieth post on this site (fifty! Can you believe it? It seems like such a huge number in such a short space of time) focuses on ‘Amnesiac’, a record that was Radiohead’s fifth album, which, with one of its tracks, took the band to fifty combined tracks on albums. The fifth track is entitled ‘I Might Be Wrong’ which subsequently went on to title the band’s live album, no song breaks the five minute mark, and it was released on the fifth of the month by a band that has five members. So the number five, and certain multiples of it, are very relevant to the album. And originally I was going to give it a grade of 5 and say, hey look! It’s meant to be. But then I was listening to this thinking about what I was going to write here and I realised that I always forget how good this album is, and to pull my gimmick with the number five would be a complete lie.

The basic deal with this album was that during the sessions for ‘Kid A’ the band recorded a huge number of songs which they thought were good enough to be on an album, but they couldn’t sequence them into a decent double, so they sequenced them into a single album and then put all the other good songs out separately, a year later. And that is where the main problem lies. The actual songs here are, for the most part, just as brilliant as what you can find on ‘Kid A’. It’s just that the cohesion isn’t there in the same way. The whole is exactly equal to the sum of its parts, rather than greater than, as the absolute best albums usually are.

Beginning track ‘Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box’ is controversial, completely electronic, built up exclusively of tape loops and autotune used to such excess that it lampoons the use of the technique in mainstream music. It’s weirder than anything that came before and it’s pretty easy to imagine someone getting a minute or two into this song and switching it all off. But wait! Next comes ‘Pyramid Song’, and even as electronics patter around the main piano line it retains its status as accessible with a capital A. Radiohead were experimental, sure, but in their hearts they were all about the balladry, and this one’s beautiful, the rare song that a casual listener can enjoy the overall effect of and the intense listener can appreciate the complexity of.

‘I Might Be Wrong’ is a shock because it’s hardly electronic at all, I mean, you can actually hear a guitar! Does anyone else ever wonder what Johnny Greenwood actually did during the session for these albums? Was he really involved in writing and arranging or did he sit at the back of the studio playing Tetris, eating custard creams and waiting to be called upon? Anyway, even if this was the only song here to feature him (it’s not) it would be worth it. It’s a stunningly unpredictable song. Just listening to it gives me a thrill.

I love the whole idea behind ‘Morning Bell/Amnesiac’ – the fact that the band recorded different versions of a song and put them out on completely separate albums. I’d really like to see more of that; in that the best version could be the album track and then the alternatives could be included as bonus tracks. It’s fascinating to see the different directions the band considered going with the same material. In this case I think the previous ‘Morning Bell’ is superior, but that doesn’t stop me putting the two side by side, enjoying them both and then comparing notes.

Calling it filler would be going too far, but I never fall in love with ‘Hunting Bears’. I think Thom Yorke’s vocals are such an important part of the Radiohead sound, and this, being an instrumental, doesn’t have them. It’s well made and it features a combination of the electronics and guitars that I like a lot, but it’s not the only song to do this (‘Knives Out’, anyone? That’s another great moment, almost a more mature version of something off ‘The Bends’) and as such it’s just superfluous to requirements.

More songs! It feels like there are so many songs here, so much going on throughout. I’m hugely into ‘Like Spinning Plates’ which is one of my favourites here. Its long instrumental intro is very disorientating while the drone of the vocal half makes the whole thing completely hypnotic, an effect caused by its backwards recording. The band could use that power for evil, trying to control our minds by changing ‘While you make pretty speeches I’m being cut to shreds’ to ‘Give me your bank details and pin code and let me just borrow your car’.

‘Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors’ is the one people skip because it doesn’t add anything to your opinion of it on subsequent listens, and final track ‘Life in a Glass House’ is great at the beginning but disappoints me at the end as I’m not a fan of the dissonant trumpet that’s going on there. A let down of an ending to an excellent record.

Radiohead are one of my favourites and this album is just as good as most of their discography. If you liked ‘Kid A’, you’d be a fool not to get this too. If you really didn’t like ‘Kid A’ for whatever reason then it’s probably valid for you to skip this, or at least don’t pay money for it until you’re sure that you like it.

Here’s to tripling the number of posts on this site by the end of 2013.