Let’s get a few things straight. Radiohead have little interest in being ‘the most important band in the world’ (yawn) or, for that matter, in being wilfully ‘obscure’ or ‘difficult’ (two of the epithets most commonly associated with their name these days). To quote Thom Yorke: ‘If you really love music, you don’t want to repeat yourself… And if you hear other people’s music, you’re influenced by it. The things you love really inspire you and make you go off and do something else.’
It’s that simple. Rather than honing or re-packaging their distinctive sound which emerged with The Bends and OK Computer, Radiohead have opened themselves up to alternative influences. And the opportunity to express themselves a little differently. To quote Yorke again: ‘What we’re doing isn’t that radical.’ He wisely hasn’t made the comparison himself, but it’s no more than Bowie, Dylan, Zappa, Beefheart, Pink Floyd - and countless jazz musicians like Miles Davis - did throughout their careers.
So, hot on the heels of last year’s Kid A (still, for my money, the most thrilling, intense and richly detailed piece of musical drama I’ve heard since DJ Shadow’s Entroducing) comes its companion piece, Amnesiac. Both are compact (45 mins apiece), beautifully produced by Nigel Godrich, and demand a good deal of concentration before unfurling their core to the listener. Both range across - and continually blend - offbeat electronica, jazz, noodling guitar, orchestral strings and small fragments of surprisingly straightforward song-writing. They sound like nothing so much as a group of highly talented young musicians using their plentiful resources of time and money to push themselves to their absolute creative limits.
That these two wonderfully inventive and varied records should have been received so grudgingly (or wrong-headedly)* by the world of popular music journalism is a sorry indication of how impoverished and shallow our discourse about art has become. But in a sense that is precisely their point. Radiohead have nothing been anything less than monumentally critical of what passes for culture within our ultra-mediated world of pre-packaged experiences.
In that respect, it is impossible not to take Amnesiac as another challenge to the complacency and laziness of the consumer mentality that demands easily digestible chunks of vicarious experience. It’s not an easy listen, not least because it has so much raw emotion - fear, disgust, horror - coursing through it. ‘You want to hear what’s going on with us?’ it seems to say. ‘Well, you asked...’ A great deal of the material included here, apparently, was recorded in one take; certainly there is a strong sense of studio experiments and fortuitous accidents being pieced together and played off each other for effect rather than ‘songs’ being written.
Like Kid A, it also comes packaged with an intriguing set of images by Stanley Donwood which really deserve a separate review of their own. Personally I don’t understand why this aspect to Radiohead’s work hasn’t been more widely discussed (apart from a short article in Creative Review last year, you have to go to fansites to find informed debate about it). It has often been said that the CD killed off album design as a medium for artists to work within, but here is a band who make sure that every release of theirs has an artistic component to match the complexity of their music. As with the state-of-the-art tents they commissioned for last year’s tour, there is the sense that Radiohead like to give their fans that little bit extra.
The packaging for Amnesiac - a closed book - is, however, a stark cchallenge to interpretation. The work contained within it is baffingly opaque, dark and, at times, almost comically disturbed. There are no pointers as to how to read these images, no tell-tale signposts to irony or earnestness alike - which is also, as it happens, the feel of a good deal of the music on Amnesiac. Together, they create the impression of eavesdropping, unmediated, on someone’s inner world. It’s an uncomfortable experience. Are they deranged? Or sane? Are they just playing? Who knows…
We can only go on listening, and wondering. That Radiohead have found their way through the perilous thicket of modern stardom to the wholly idiosyncratic, impenetrable territory they now inhabit is something to celebrate. What they mean to do with it is, of course, their business entirely.
-FB
* A number of reviews of Amnesiac have suggested it is a ‘return to form’, ‘as if Kid A never happened’. This is nonsense – and lazy journalism. Sure, in ‘Pyramid Song’ and ‘Knives Out’, ‘Amnesiac’ has a couple of songs which wouldn’t have been out of place on OK Computer. But the other nine are cut from entirely different cloth. As with the reviews of Kid A, one cannot escape the suggestion that few music journalists bother to spend much time actually listening to - and living with - the work they like to pronounce on.
The Big Chill
06.01