Radiohead
Amnesiac

As divisive as Radiohead's Kid A is, if there's one thing everyone could have agreed upon when they first heard the record it's this: It didn't have to be this way. But is that a reason for lamentation or celebration? It depends on whom you ask. Oddly, the mainstream media - when it searched for someone to "save" rock - was correct to look to the pre-Kid A Radiohead. The critical and commercial consensus of OK Computer - it was even selected in Q magazine as the Best Album of All Time - made the band rock's industry-appointed torchbearers. But save it for whom and from what? Technophobes and those wary of the encroachment of hip-hop and dance culture, most likely. And on the basis of the reaction to U2's last record, one could assume that they didn't quite think Radiohead did the job.

There are scores of artists currently doing things as much as or more sonically interesting than Radiohead, but most of them - from top 40 radio architects such as the Neptunes or Timbaland to electronic mavericks such as Aphex Twin and Kid 606 - are doing so in breakbeat culture or on rock's fringe. Radiohead are doing it where it always has: In the public eye. Incredibly, Radiohead are - like the best of their contemporaries, the Beta Band and Super Furry Animals - progressing with each record, and as the one band with the potential to expose as many people and as many other artists to a new approach to rock music, could push the whole of music along with it. The band understands that rock isn't solely the province of guitar, bass, and drums. It understands that music is the organization of sounds, rather than the organization of notes. Most importantly, it understands that rock doesn't need to be saved when it is already evolving. Radiohead's development - taking the most leftfield, striking aspects of one record in order to structure the sound of the next - echoes Roxy Music and solo Brian Eno, the Talking Heads, and most of all, David Bowie in his Berlin period. (All helped in no small way by Eno). Like Bowie, Thom Yorke - unhappy about and confused with his fame after a worldwide commercial breakthrough - sought solace in electronic music. It comes as no surprise, then, that Yorke also seems to have sought solace in the records that emerged from Bowie's creative breakthrough (Low, "Heroes", and Lodger). That trio is the clearest artistic, commercial, and critical antecedent to Radiohead's latest releases, and the blueprint, if not in sound than in spirit, for the band's evolution.

Bowie's Berlin records were greeted with puzzlement, even hostility, on release, but ultimately helped spawn new wave and synth-pop, nudge post-punk, and legitimize ambient music. Radiohead's most recent releases could lay similar groundwork for a rock world that needs to be reminded the value of sonic ambition and experimentation. If Kid A is Radiohead's Low, the monolithic sound of unhappiness turned down to one, Amnesiac is Lodger, a core of pop sensibility wrapped in coats of musique concrete and sound collage. All that's missing is the Die Brucke-inspired cover art. One of the remarkable things about Kid A is that in the increasingly fractured musical world the record elicited comment and reaction from an alarming variety of artists. Interviewers asked everyone from Billy Corgan to Outkast about the record, and, if you cared to read it as such, those answers became a sort of litmus test: Who gets it and who doesn't. Opinions about the album's quality didn't draw the boundary; questioning Radiohead's intentions did. It drew the line between those willing to embrace adventure and possibility and those running from it - especially in Britain. Muse's Matt Bellamy chortled after the release of Kid A, thanking Radiohead for abandoning the Proper Song market. Travis and Coldplay must have been pleased as well, they were free to continue rewriting "High and Dry," inserting their own clichéd pleasantries, without further Radiohead comparisons.

And in a recent NME, Noel Gallagher says Oasis' new record will be a return to its roots rather than a new direction because "they tried that last time." So who's looking forward to that? Anyone who, in recent months, gobbled up the new records by Ocean Colour Scene, Manic Street Preachers, and the Stereophonics, probably. In the hands of those bands, rock - with a litany of endlessly list-making Baby Boomer media and a Hall-of-Fame mentality - is a willfully stale world, one in which picking up a guitar too often means reclamation rather than exploration. The ultimate irony is that their heroes (the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Kinks, the Who, the Byrds, and others) were musical innovators that, for the most part, attempted to expand their sound - and by extension the whole of rock - with each new record.

In contrast, it's the largely canonization-free world of dance and hip-hop, fueled by the thrill of the Now and the promise of tomorrow, in which Radiohead - and peers such as the Betas, Super Furries, and Damon Albarn - seemingly find fraternity and inspiration. Like the best electronic and hip-hop artists, they're creating tracks without structural expectations, ones on which something fresh, exciting, and surprising can happen at every step. Kid A, meticulously sequenced, ebbed and flowed more like a DJ set than the stuttering stop-and-start of a rock show. Like the best electronic, or even classical records, the album was best enjoyed as a whole, as well; it was more than the sum of its parts. "Treefingers," for instance, a bland exercise in tonal stacking, is more palpable in its place as a palette-cleanser than it ever would be on its own. (A technique employed, coincidentally or not, to better effect by Daft Punk through the first six tracks of its latest record.) Even the revisiting of "Morning Bell" is arguably akin to a remix.

On Amnesiac the songs bump up against one another, creating a tension, a push and pull. There is a discernible method to the album's sequencing - an oscillation between electronic and the electric - but, unlike Kid A, it's as enjoyable as individual tracks as it is together. If anything, it's this freedom - not the anticipated presence of choruses, bridges, builds, or any of the other trappings of rigid songcraft - that makes Amnesiac more accessible than its predecessor.

Even still, Amnesiac being heard one track at a time - thanks to interested listeners snatching the record from the Internet (as I admittedly have done) - has already created a curiously modern backlash. Some are chiding Radiohead for what are felt to be wasted tracks after they've spent, for instance, 10 minutes waiting to retrieve an audio file of "Hunting Bears" only to discover that it's a two-minute, Robert Fripp-like instrumental. It's an ironic quibble considering the still prevailing mentality which cites the album format as proof of rock's superiority to dance or hip-hop.

What's more, the surest sign of Radiohead's development is that the song that those critics are most likely to embrace, "Knives Out," is the album's most pedestrian. Built on the strum of an acoustic guitar and a "Trickster"-like soloing, it's the only track here that could easily fit onto The Bends. (Unsurprisingly, it's tipped for release as a single.)

There could have been a few more arena-ready moments on Amnesiac, but instead the ballads are less prototypical and more restrained, free of the bombast and falsettos that characterized some of the band's previous efforts. The weary "You and Whose Army?" with its compressed 1940s jazz vocal is particularly revelatory and disciplined. Yorke even manages to make a salient political statement: From him, the weak call for assertion and aggression could be read as a fitting metaphor for helplessness in the face of corporate hegemony. For all of Yorke's railing against the WTO, New Labour, and the like (the clumsy lyrics of "Electioneering,' the "Karma Police" video, a vision of the paranoia and distress caused by indifferent, unseen forces, the No Logo tents), this is the first time he manages to do so without Bonoesque pomposity.

"Pyramid Song" is a lyrical misstep - Thom's treading the same river water here as on "How to Disappear Completely" - but a sonic winner. A lush and meditative piano-led ballad, it borders on torch song before the band joins in with a rush of dense white noise that boosts the track without buoyancy or grandiosity. "Amnesiac / Morning Bell," with its organ and horns replacing the throbbing bass line of the original, is now more of a mourning bell. Critics are already honing in on it as unnecessary and gratuitous, but it's a welcome improvement.

Even the songs that threaten to retreat into structure and conform to expectations - the sinewy "Dollars and Cents" and the bluesy "I Might Be Wrong" - instead tease and subvert the elements of songcraft like Bowie's Lodger, early Roxy Music, and Wire. "Dollars and Cents" throbs with the jittery, jagged propulsion of Magazine or the Dismemberment Plan, picking up momentum as it churns along, attempting to reign itself in only to see the sound driven forward again with a tension insinuative of the entire album. "I Might Be Wrong" rises from the same swamp that spawned "Optimistic," part P.J. Harvey, part Bad Seeds, punctuated with a lovely, too-short outro.

"Like Spinning Plates," its music and some of its vocals backward, is a luminous, textured work rooted in Seefeel, Disco Inferno, and glitch. The backward tape throbs and whirrs, adding layers of backward, then frontward, then doubletracked vocals, over increasingly delicate layers of tones. When Yorke claims, 'and this just feels like spinning plates,' he's only half right - it sounds like it as well. A jazz influence also pops up all over the record - chiefly in the organic, two-chord feel of the record's non-electronic songs - but never so implicitly as the languid, horn-peppered "Life in a Glass House," a natural album closer.

Ultimately, Amnesiac is characterized best by a beauty that veers between spectral and Spectoresque, one that blends the best elements of the dichotomy of, surprise, Bowie's Berlin work. This is particularly revealing on the album's most experimental tracks, "Packt Like Sardnes in a Crushd Tin Box" and "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors." Those songs' mix of minimalism and bass carry echoes of the Beta Band's "To You Alone," the Dismemberment Plan's "You Are Invited," and the work of German electronic artists such as To Rococo Rot or Isolée, but at their heart have more in common with Timbaland and Missy Elliot than anyone else. "I'm a reasonable man/ Get off my case," Yorke pleads over fractured, skipping beats, a low hum, and an occasional staccato blast on "Packt." His vocals relaxed, he oozes more organically into a Warp and Rephlex-inspired soundscape here than on its Kid A predecessor, "Idioteque."

"Pulk/Pull" is even more experimental, beginning with disjointed, throbbing pulses not unlike those which begin Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker." A sinister bass line cocoons Thom's paranoid android vocals, and the song is occasionally shot through, first with melodious piano and then the whoosh of My Bloody Valentine-like fuzz. It's the band's most leftfield track to date, and one of the album's highlights. No, it didn't have to be this way at all.

Following the delicate but slightly scattered weariness of Kid A, Amnesiac is another epiphany. "After years of waiting, nothing came / And I realized I was looking in the wrong place," Yorke sings on the opening track. For him, the past has been reconciled and forgotten. If only the rest of the rock world could do the same.

-Scott Plagenhoef

StopSmiling.net
10.05.01