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.
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