Radiohead - The Bends (1995)

1) Planet Telex; 2) The Bends; 3) High and Dry; 4) Fake Plastic Trees; 5) Bones; 6) (Nice Dream); 7) Just; 8) My Iron Lung; 9) Bullet Proof... I Wish I Was; 10) Black Star; 11) Sulk; 12) Street Spirit (Fade Out)

Talk about a growth spurt.

Key tracks: "The Bends", "Fake Plastic Trees", "Street Spirit (Fade Out)"

Radiohead are traditionally seen as a band who are not bothered by the expectations of others and thus they fearlessly do exactly whatever it is they want at any given time. This is for the most part completely true (and it's why most of their albums sound completely unexpected), with the exception of The Bends. At this stage the band were dealing with critics who had already labelled them a one hit wonder after "Creep", audiences who only wanted to hear "Creep" and a record label who really, really wanted them to record more "Creeps", and so there was an incredible amount of pressure on the band for their sophomore. What made things worse is Radiohead had never been too keen on their sudden smash hit to begin with (the signature guitar disruptions were an attempt to sabotage the song, which backfired spectacularly) and thanks to its runaway fame, they had already began to despise the song they felt had became an anchor around their necks - the first informal taster for The Bends was "My Iron Lung" which was a very unsubtle dismissal of "Creep". Rather than cave in to the pressure of the follow-up, Radiohead's motivation for their second album became the need to demonstrate to the world that there was more to them than just one song and that whatever they released needed to shut up any doubters who were dismissing the band as already-has-beens.

So The Bends is all about Radiohead proving their worth and it does it with flying colours. While it’s a clear continuation from the grunge-era guitar walls Pablo Honey rather than a radical shake-up, Radiohead are not just showing a whole lot more ambition and range here but they're also not so subtly showing it off and flexing their capabilities. There’s a wider range of tones and moods than Pablo Honey ever had and running through the album is constant and obvious experimentation with production choices, arrangements and atypical song structures; even Yorke has stepped up with his lyrics, starting to develop his own characteristic voice. "Planet Telex" is a very intentional starting point for the album because it demonstrates from the lift-off that this isn't the same Radiohead who made their humble appearance a few years ago, its spacey atmospherics, loop-like drums and electric piano distancing the band as far as they can from the previous album's limited soundworld. Though "Planet Telex" is the furthest out there that The Bends goes, much of the album sounds like Radiohead challenging themselves to do something new with every song like each track began as a songwriting exercise to write something in X sound or style. It's never predictable where the album goes and just when you think you've figured The Bends out, it throws another curveball or sidestep to a different style and sound with the next song.

That's much of the album and not all, and thanks to that it becomes ridiculously obvious what the lowlights are. The Bends is a classic by its reputation and due to its importance in the wider Radiohead timeline, but it's not a classic wholly on its songs - otherwise we wouldn't have "Sulk", "Black Star" or "Bones" cluttering the tracklist. They're so close to Pablo Honey that their inclusion here was either the band throwing an uncharacteristic bone to the past audiences or they simply didn't have as much new material as they thought they did and thus some b-roll material was thrown in to fill the album. It's the only way to explain the gap between their middle-of-the-road rock antics and the rest of the album: if The Bends is about looking forward, then these three songs inexplicably revert back to the past. On Pablo Honey they may have stood out more positively but in the new company they're in they're sticks in a mud and almost haplessly straightforward compared to everything else going on.

That "everything else" meanwhile really is one of music's great and unexpected level-ups. Half the album was released as singles in one way or another and they're largely all incredible and miles ahead of anything on the last album. "Planet Telex" soars with its space-age textures, "High and Dry" is a rare glimpse of Radiohead in an unabashed pop mode in a way they'd these days rather forget about even though songs like this demonstrate how brilliant they were at it, "Fake Plastic Trees" launched a thousand other British rock ballads draped in strings and none of them ever bettered the earnest emotional power of the original, "My Iron Lung" is a noisy and unpredictable kiss-off that gets more delightfully sassy as it goes while bridging this and the last album together in a very natural manner, and "Street Spirit" as the closing chapter points the way forward to the next, previewing the anxiety and depression of OK Computer as it submerges itself into a gorgeous, haunting darkness that's scarily blissful towards the vocal runs of the end (a sentiment like "immerse your soul in love" has never sounded more foreboding). The direct guitar anthem "Just" is the only one that's never particularly grabbed me and it's for no real reason why that I could point out (great video though!), but I do find that the borderline joyously bouncy "The Bends" actually does everything it does but better, and in my imaginary timeline these would have swapped their single and deep cut statuses; "The Bends" also very powerfully brings the album back to earth after the shock cold open of "Planet Telex" which further adds to its impact. "Nice Dream" and "Bullet Proof" in-between are both slow and atmospheric, too gentle to jump out but beautifully serene enough to sink into, showcasing the band's growing desire to build and sustain moods rather than simply go out loud at all times; plus, the sudden wake-up call of "Nice Dream"'s ending is the most memorable structural whiplash thrown at the listener on the record.

The thing is, The Bends is clearly a transitional album: not only for Radiohead themselves whose story would start in earnest with OK Computer (as most people would attest to),  but also for British rock as a whole as you can easily point to specific songs here that acted as launchpads for the entire careers of other groups. That's a ridiculous amount of accolade and cultural importance which can easily obstruct that at the end of the day this is still an album by a band caught in the middle of a more significant development phase. Therefore, all the usual hallmarks of transitional albums apply here too despite The Bends' significance in the Radiohead biography: it's one foot in the future and the other still stuck in the past, moments of brilliance and exciting peeks in future directions interspersed with old ways still lingering around and hints of change that have yet to be fully realised. A good half of this album is inarguably brilliant and still stands strong with the rest of the band's discography even if they undoubtedly became a much more exciting band later down the line, and though the other half of the tracklist is more hit and miss there is a rush of excitement in hearing the band figuring out who they are with such vivid ambition. Often that energy and ambition also translates to genuinely excellent pieces of 90s guitar crunch. Over the years I've gone back and forth and back and forth with The Bends (in RYM it's probably one of the albums I've most changed the rating to), from early indifference to various honeymoon phases when it cracked through my defenses and then wild pendulum motions depending on which aspect of the band resonates with me more at any given moment. It probably tells as much about me as a listener as it does about The Bends' nature as an album in-between phases and while I've now landed somewhere between "good" and "really good" with it, don't let the comparatively "low" (pft) personal rating fool you. This is still an essential 1990s rock album for its influence alone.

Rating: 7/10

Radiohead - Kid A (2000)

1) Everything in Its Right Place; 2) Kid A; 3) The National Anthem; 4) How to Disappear Completely; 5) Treefingers; 6) Optimistic; 7) In Limbo; 8) Idioteque; 9) Morning Bell; 10) Motion Picture Soundtrack

The famous reinvention. Not as radical to modern ears but it's hard to argue this didn't leave an impact and changed Radiohead forever. And it remains great. 

Key tracks: "Everything in Its Right Place", "The National Anthem", "How to Disappear Completely"

Kid A is an album with a Legacy. It’s defined by its origin story and cultural context so much that the music largely comes secondary: notice how Kid A is mostly talked about as a whole, rather than as individual songs. It’s the story of a rock band whose sound defined the late 90s abandoning all that, taking their music into a whole new world and who then ended up defining rock music as a whole afterwards. By now artists going electronic is a trope we’ve come to expect during the lifetime of every guitar band and it wasn’t exactly rare before Kid A either (see 1998, the year bands seemed to collectively discover samplers and synthesizers) but Radiohead’s open love for IDM and the sheer conviction they threw themselves out into the new world with – not to mention their global size at the time – changed gears forevermore. Add some flair about the usage of internet in its infancy and the disconnection and chaos the band themselves felt about what they were doing, and you’ve got the ingredients to a perfect analytical album retrospective. Even if it’s not all true, it sounds plausible enough to be so.

It’s not unusual for context-specific significance to fade away for those who come to the artefact later on down the line, having become used to the effects of the revolution. No one who’s gone through Modern Rock 101 would expect Kid A to sound as wild now as it did back then, even back when I got into this roughly a decade ago. Well, it does – kind of. It’s still a significant album in Radiohead’s discography. But there’s this nagging feeling at the back of your head whenever you listen to it, especially when you first put it on after all the raving and story-building and one which you can never shake fully even after you’ve come to readjust your views. Wasn’t this supposed to be an electronic album?

Kid A is more like a hedging-your-bets kind of transitionary album than the genre revolution it’s made out to be. Amnesiac took the full dive and Hail to the Thief moulded it all together but Kid A is still clearly the work of the same band who made OK Computer, logically progressing from one point to the next. A lot of guitar, a lot of conventional band playing, a lot of the same songwriting you’ve come to expect. The much touted electronic elements aren’t even the best part of the album. “Everything in Its Right Place” is really good but fizzles out into nothing rather than keeps its momentum, “Treefingers” goes all ambient but is ultimately an interlude and the parallel universe dance anthem “Idioteque” is great until you hear any of its live versions and discover how disappointingly flat the album version is. Only the glacial IDM gallop “Kid A” feels like a great idea meeting a fully fleshed out production. It’s the moment where your expectations meet reality, and it’s great.

But Kid A is an excellent album nonetheless. If conjures a soundscape of isolation and ice-cold otherworldliness perfectly – someone once said the cover art is like looking at a forest fire from a distance, observing the chaos from afar in silence, and it’s a great way to describe the album’s atmosphere. It’s filled with anxiety, terror and horror (“we’re not scare-mongering, this is really happening”) but it’s distanced from all of it, wrapped up in its isolation chamber and covering all the panic with a cool detachment. Here and there the shield breaks down – the soul-crushing existential loneliness of “How to Disappear Completely”, the bits of “Idioteque” where it almost goes mental (and would, without the production stopping it) – but Kid A picks itself back up quickly, fixes the front and returns to its wintery solitude. Radiohead have made a career out of standing at the verge of madness – here they sound calm and at ease, in a manner more disconcerting than when they’re about to break down.

The bit about no one ever mentioning Kid A’s songs makes sense the more you tug into the album. It’s not album where titles jump out of the tracklist in a “that is my jam” kind of way, but it’s a tracklist where each song knows its place in the greater whole. The “Optimistic”/”In Limbo” duo is the perfect example. “Optimistic” throws away any notion of this being an electronic album with what it being a rifftastic rock band effort and it’s nowhere near among Radiohead’s best in that regard, but its relative loudness and brashness acts as an excellent foil to the rest of the album and it sounds far better in its right place than it does out of it. “In Limbo” is effectively an extended outro that had the audacity to try to morph into its own song and it’s a little too formless to make it fully work, but it’s hard to not get wrapped in its groove when it slyly appears on the album. It’s a cliché but Kid A is first and foremost an album rather than a selection of songs, and the sum is far greater than the parts ever will be individually. That’s not to say that it doesn’t have songs that wouldn’t be great on their own. “Kid A” is an exciting glimpse into what the album could be, “How to Disappear Completely” is a spine-chilling classic and arguably Radiohead’s greatest “ballad” (“mood piece” is probably a better term), “The National Anthem” is one hell of a groove-monster you would not expect this album to contain, coming with an instant classic bass riff, and “Morning Bell” finds the band taking the sound elements of the title track and applying them onto a rock song in fantastic, hypnotic results.

None of it’s really revolutionary. In fact, you can hear traces of them all in Radiohead’s prior works and they’re only now becoming realized. Kid A’s supposed genre shift feels more and more out of place the more you listen to it, the more you listen to Radiohead and the more you listen to music. There’s countless albums that have been branded with “X’s Kid A” that actually do the Kid A thing better than the real deal does. But the more you listen to the album and the more you listen to Radiohead, the more it’s clear that the shift is mostly in the personal level. Whether or not it’s radical in how it does it, this album is where Radiohead re-wrote their own rulebook and took a new approach to writing and playing music that they still hold onto today. As an album it’s not quite the 90s gloom rock as the ones prior or the twitched-up art rock of the albums after, happily mediating in the middle. As a bridge it works perfectly – for so many people this was the album that made them realise sides of the band they’d never thought about and opened the way onwards, myself included. The legacy and the hype might not quite hit the nail on the head then, but it still holds an important place in the band’s history and in people’s record collections. That, however, is because of the music within and the overall experience the ten songs work together to bring.

Rating: 8/10

Radiohead - Pablo Honey (1993)

1) You; 2) Creep; 3) How Do You?; 4) Stop Whispering; 5) Thinking About You; 6) Anyone Can Play Guitar; 7) Ripcord; 8) Vegetable; 9) Prove Yourself; 10) I Can’t; 11) Lurgee; 12) Blow Out

I want to say this is underrated given the automatic dismissal it always receives, but if you stop thinking of this as a Radiohead Moment and just as a slice of 90s emo rock, you're all set for a reasonably enjoyable if unoriginal experience.

Key tracks: "You", "Creep", "Stop Whispering"

Honestly, this isn’t as bad as people say. But then that's probably not surprising.

Given Radiohead’s stylistic evolution and the band’s legacy since, Pablo Honey has long ago stopped being just a slightly underdone debut album. Radiohead were most definitely not a band who arrived fully formed into the world and the clash between their early days and their most famous works is so jarring that Pablo Honey has undergone a cultural transformation. Its name has become the catch-all reference for debut albums that bear no resemblance to the artist's later works, used as a comparison point for any beginnings considered to be either a forgettable throwaway or downright bad (and just to confess, I’ve been guilty of that as well - I’m trying to stop, honest!). These days you tend to just assume Pablo Honey is not a good album. The continuing cultural relevance of “Creep” probably doesn’t help - that the band who have become a sacred cow for so many people is only known in public for a somewhat unintentionally cheesy, extremely 90s angst anthem to end all angst anthemsis arguably a thorn in the side that gets a lot of people a little annoyed.

It shouldn't be too much of a shock then that Pablo Honey is not actually the worst thing ever, but it might be a minor revelation how it's much more competent than expected. Fair enough, it’s hardly as interesting to listen to as the later albums, none of the band members have developed their trademark styles and the musical influences are so openly on display it leans close to being a tribute. You also can’t shake the feeling how much Pablo Honey sounds like a typical 90s example of a one-hit wonder album, the kind that gets relegated to countless discount bins and car boot sales after a single big song: "Creep" simply has such an overwhelming presence over it. But still, none of that makes it a bad listen and in fact, it’s actually close to being rather good. There’s a lot of truth in the common argument that the band didn't exactly have the most inspired sound here and the cheap production certainly doesn't do it any favours, but it’s obvious that even at this stage they had a clue about what makes a good song. “Creep” may be a little worn out but it’s a perfect example of this, with its lingering guitar riff, effectively built quiet/loud mechanics, the delicate addition of a piano to guide the song to its end and the incredibly effective ear worm of a hook that is the famous guitar crunch - all very big, important dynamic moments. There are a lot more similar moments of inspiration scattered throughout the album and plenty of surprisingly strong melodic work slyly hiding underneath. “You”, the opener, in particular is a genuinely great song full of power and volume, straddling between Pixies and Jeff Buckley and its placement as the start of the album is a crucial one - it strips you from all the preconceptions you might go into the album with by greeting you with a genuine keeper.

Just to clarify - it’s not that Pablo Honey is a great album either, per se. Every single flaw listed above between the lines is still valid - its production is pretty dire, the music is derivative, and the whole deal is a bit rough around the edges and unrefined. “Anyone Can Play Guitar” is more unintentionally amusing than legitimately good and there’s a few more obvious duds like “Prove Yourself” where the songs just aren’t up to scratch. But it still manages to shine a little regardless. It’s a scattering of good melodies, great rock parts and memorable Yorke-isms, thrown a little all over the place but frequently enough to keep the ride steady. The only genuine stand-out songs are limited to “You” and “Creep” admittedly, with the atmospheric closer “Blow Out” and bizarrely U2-esque “Stop Whispering” getting a honourable mention, but the majority of the rest of the lot is still captivating. Yorke and the gang already come across convincingly and they have the charisma to sell the songs, turning an otherwise fairly rote set of anxiety rock into a reasonably engaging experience. You can’t really overstate the effect Yorke’s voice plays on this, the young tone already hinting at what is one of the most strangely commanding voices of his generation.

The nutshell summary of it all then is that Pablo Honey is actually a pretty decent album in itself. Radiohead went onto have such a great and fascinating career that they ended up completely undermining where they started from in the process, but that’s not really Pablo Honey’s fault. While it’s pretty obviously the weakest part of Radiohead’s discography, it’s got more charm to it than it’s commonly given credit for - to the point in fact that if they had decided to make a life out of going further along this path, they still probably would have turned out to be a great band, just a very different one. It's the blatantly awkward first steps and a reminder that you shouldn't always start chronologically when checking out interesting artists, but it's got enough to give credit for it that even a 6/10 review ends up sounding positively glowing.

Rating: 6/10

Radiohead - OK Computer (1997)

1) Airbag; 2) Paranoid Android; 3) Subterranean Homesick Alien; 4) Exit Music (For a Film); 5) Let Down; 6) Karma Police; 7) Fitter Happier; 8) Electioneering; 9) Climbing Up the Walls; 10) No Surprises; 11) Lucky; 12) The Tourist

Pre-millennial angst that changed things forevermore. You know this.

Key tracks: "Let Down", "No Surprises", "Lucky"

I'd like to think I'm good about not letting the wider critical world affect my own amateur reviews. Rather than saying this or that is overrated or underrated, or making parallels about my opinions vs everyone else's, I prefer looking at things within my own bubble - after all, it's my opinion that matters the most to my listening habits and I imagine someone would read my thoughts to learn what I personally think. With some records that's harder than others. There's a number of albums that are so universal that they form a part of our collective consciousness even if we don't care about them: albums which have been discussed and analysed so often and in such great detail due to their importance and place in the canon that there is literally nothing new to say. Most of the time, I can still comfortably get by. Enough time has passed from The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and other sacred cows that the old canon narratives are actively being argued against while new ones are established and there's a wider variety of opinions challenging the old classics, and somewhere between those lines I'm able to place my own opinion without feeling like I'm better off just linking to the relevant Wikipedia section. Not to mention that for most iconic records, I'm too much of a natural contrarian to hold them in the highest of pedestals in the first place.

OK Computer is a curveball for me in this regard. It's a landmark album, and even I agree with that - to a degree that it feels like an actual challenge to start dissecting it apart. You're not going to find unique angles to view this album through from me, is what I am saying. It's my generation's Sgt Peppers, and I'm saying that without a single ounce of hyperbole. It's a cultural milestone that has affected so much of the other music I enjoy, inspired countless other musicians and shifted genre trends. To this day it causes so much discussion, analysis and over-analysis that we are all absolutely sick of it. We can all recite from memory the story of Thom Yorke & co becoming increasingly fatigued by society and music industry at the same time as they felt their ambitions limited by their early sound, and in turn exploding in fame and finding themselves even more fatigued through the record they made to channel all of that frustration and ambition through. And if you don't, you're pretending - because OK Computer transcends any genre barrier knowledge if you're even remotely passionate about music. It's omnipresent.You can't avoid it, no matter how much you want.

Even now, OK Computer is a prime example of a band reaching for their lofty ambitions and realising the breadth of their own skill set, and taking a boundary-breaking leap within their own path. Comparing Pablo Honey and The Bends to it is practically pointless because the change is so vast: there's enough hints on both albums, particularly The Bends, to point out where OK Computer came from but the narrative is loose, the familiarities superficial at best. OK Computer effectively re-introduces Radiohead from scratch: the urban angst of grunge-era guitar walls has evolved into pre-millennial apathy and depression, and the band are musically thinking outside their own box to the point that the tropes introduced here are now aspects the band are forever associated with. Not just that, but they're also elements that are echoed within the particular kind of rock music that followed in OK Computer's wake. You can trace a direct genealogy from it to nearly everything that has been happening in indie and alternative rock since. You think of angst-laden, introspective guitars and you'll be able to trace them here.

Like all the very best progenitors, OK Computer still sounds like its own thing even now. Despite how many times its tricks have been repeated, there's nothing that combines them quite like here. Part of it is due to Radiohead's own uniqueness, the very specific traits its members have: Yorke's falsetto wailing (oft imitated, never bettered) and characteristic lyrical style most obviously, but also Jonny Greenwood's flourishes inspired by modern classical and Phil Selway's razor-sharp drumming. There's also the neurotic flair that OK Computer is powered by that has never really been captured by its followers in quite this way. Yorke was very obviously not having a good time, the band as a whole found inspiration through it and traces of it are all over the album, whether it's the resigned exhaustion of "No Surprises", the anger of "Electioneering" or the downright crippling paranoia of "Climbing Up the Walls". OK Computer frequently sounds like its suffocating within its own four walls creeping closer together, only to push them periodically away to reveal something hopeful for a fleeting moment.

OK Computer isn't Radiohead's best album. I understand why "Paranoid Android" is iconic and as admirable as its multi-suite progression is, I've never seen it as a particular discography highlight and its first part towers above the others to the point I wish it was the blueprint for the entire song, and "Electioneering" meanwhile is basically an attempt to re-do R.E.M.'s "Ignoreland" but quite simply not as good. They're good but neither are songs I could say lifts the album for me. I also just think that Radiohead started to get really interesting after they decided to deconstruct and reassemble themselves in OK Computer's aftermath, which is when their skitterish neuroses found a sound that perfectly suited it. But, I understand why it's such a revered album, and it wouldn't need a great stretch to make me into a true believer too. After all, many of their best songs are here. "Let Down" is in some days is in fact the best song they ever wrote, period, making the world-weary desire to disappear into the most gorgeous thing when in its final minutes the song jumps off a cliff and soars into the sunset on the wings of its layered vocal parts and intensifying instrumental section. "Karma Police" is one of Radiohead's most haunting but bottles a quietly churning rage, and it twists that dagger deeper with each new section it offers. The finale for "Exit Music (For a Film)" is like that bottled rage finally breaking through, igniting into a wall of distressed sound of the like the band's rarely tried since.

The final stretch of the album is also probably one of the all-time best closing runs: "Climbing Up the Walls" makes an orchestral section sound distressingly claustrophobic (it's phenomenal, by the way); the simple but endlessly beautiful "No Surprises" is the other big contender for the band's best song and in fact its quiet but powerful fragility is what converted me into thinking there's something to this band after all; "Lucky" is as atmospheric a rock anthem as the band would ever do and the second verse's introduction of the simple keyboard texture is one of my pet favourite moments of simple instrumental additions making a real difference; and "The Tourist" achingly floats in its own world, giving the paranoia of the album a calm breathe out in the end. OK Computer has throughout its length hit with some big punches and overall high quality miserablist rock, but it concludes like a real iconic moment in music history.

Furthermore, OK Computer still feels just as relevant as it always was as well, maybe even moreso in this modern society that's growing more cynical and fatigued by the month. It's just as evocative and its songs are still impactful, proving their strengths despite every single one of them having been picked to their bones over the years; including the "Fitter Happier" interlude, which genuinely has its own important slot in the overall flow and Greater Thematics of the album. OK Computer is a truly great album, often stunningly so, and very audibly a moment where a band realised their own capabilities towards greatness and made them a reality. That so many people in the world agree with me, a lot of them way more passionately than I do, is a happy coincidence. This is all to say that out of all the albums in my collection, OK Computer is probably the one record I find the most difficult to discuss, but you're in luck: in a matter of seconds you can find thousands of reviews, articles and in-depth essays that say what I'd likely think anyway. This must be what Beatles fans feel like.

It's not one of my personal all-time greats but its place among the canon is more than justified.

Rating: 9/10