Second album from the sessions that produced Kid A

Radiohead
Amnesiac
(Parlophone)

Rating: 4/5

Disgust, desperation, desolation, derision - all of those were once key qualities in what constituted left-field/indie. From The Birthday Party to PiL, from Elvis Costello to The Fall, Joy Division to Magazine. It was as if the strange and exhilarating shapes these bands took on were a product of their emaciating dissatisfaction with the state of things.

Nowadays, who does Disgust? Granted, there are the likes of Mogwai, but they're too peripheral to have caught the imagination of even mainstream indie fans, let alone the mainstream full stop. You might cite the slew of bands whom Radiohead have supposedly influenced - the overwrought, underwhelming Muse, the second-hand whine of Starsailor, though there's little to discern in either of those bands beyond the sort of Top 40 ambition which, as Yorke famously pointed out, makes you look very ugly.

Most typical of the state of "indie" are Coldplay, who ostensibly trace an ancestry to the great left field tradition listed above but whose relationship to them is akin to New Labour's with socialism - their indie-ness consisting of little more than a touch of henna and a pair of combat trousers. Coldplay's true ancestors are Bread, John Mile, Brian Protheroe. Their most fervently expressed wish is not to cause any trouble, which says it all.

No - only two major bands do Disgust nowadays and it's significant that both were actually borne out of the spirit of a previous musical age, the late Eighties/early Nineties. They are Manic Street Preachers, who do it loudly and, by and large, badly - and Radiohead, who do it at the low level of an insidious murmur and do it brilliantly.

It would be crude, however, to hold up Radiohead as Last Men Standing, still holding aloft the tattered pennant of post-punk agit-pop. Rather, they represent pretty much the sole major example of what Disgust can sound and look like in the 21st century, in these end-of-history times when the Blairs, the Bushes and the multinationals seem to have the whole world sewn up, when those in their late teens are too young even to remember rave - the last convulsion of musical counter-culture - let alone punk.

Radiohead most accurately reflect the present-day condition of Disgust, which is one of deep, deep recession to the point of total abstention, of wanting no further part of this world. Thom Yorke was horrified in 1995 when Melody Maker, perhaps ghoulishly, suggested that he was a "new rock martyr in the making", following speculation about his mental health - he hadn't made The Bends for people to slash their wrists to, he protested. Yet you can't help wondering if there was at least an atom of envy lurking in him at the purely aesthetic merits of Richey Manic's gesture of removing himself altogether from the face of the Earth, leaving not even a corpse behind, not even the certainty that he actually died - hence "How To Disappear Completely" on Kid A. The ultimate existential protest.

Since the rough beginnings of Pablo Honey and "Creep", whose accidental deliberate guitar jolt would set them off on their own furrow of sonic invention, Radiohead have edged, album by album, towards a state of abstraction. The enlarged, seductive hooks of The Bends suggested that that was their great strength and they should stick to it. However, then came what some saw as the expansiveness of OK Computer, as they stretched, elongated and meddled with their sound still further. Once again, it was felt that they had struck on a superb synthesis of prog-rock and indie. More of the same, please. Instead came Kid A, in which, to the chagrin of some, Yorke and Co progressed "up their own arseholes", Yorke's vocals treated, cut-up and distorted, Johnny Greenwood's guitars put through various techno/ post-rock filters, the drums and bass floating disorientated amid a miasma of electric  keyboards and sonic jetsam.

For some  this was too much. "Where were the tunes?" asked some, while others scoffed at their obtuseness in supposedly commiting "commercial suicide" - this, from the should-know-betters so infected by Eighies pragmatism that they regard even indie rock as a solid business venture rather than a counter-cultural gesture.

Others berated the band for trying to "go techno", another tired old rock band trying to get with the new computer programme. Others suggested that what Radiohead were doing was nothing new compared with avant-electronica merchants like Squarepusher and The Aphex Twin.

Truth is, however, that as Simon Reynolds pointed out in these pages last year, Kid A was different from the welter of Warp-style electronica in that it wasn't just sound for sound's sake but informed by a driving artistic spirit. Radiohead's relationship with machinery is fraught with ambivalence. They loathe automation, deride plasticity, obedience to pre-set lines and regulations. Yet they have made these modern instruments of repression - the Internet, computer graphics, sequencers - their medium, and bent them to their own ends, Yorke's intention being sarcastically to disappear amid this welter of new stuff, a sort of martyr dissolved in his own sound, cut to pieces.

And so to Amnesiac. Since it was recorded in the same sessions as Kid A it isn't The Next Leap Forward but is cut from the same cloth - Kid B, in effect. It's not exactly the leftovers, but it's not quite as strong as its partner overall, though if you loved that you'll certainly want this. Again, it's huge yet indistinct, full of embryonic mantras and half-formed slogans. No matter - there's more "said" in Yorke's pained, implacable, soaring wail than in many of his lyrics.

Take the opener, "Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box". "After years of waiting... nothing came". With its random cluster of Kraftwerkian blips, Yorke's moody electric piano, Johnny G's backward guitars squeezing down the ear like a giant worm, it's less an exciting adventure in electronica, more a sonic depiction of a hellish, absurd existence.

"Pyramid Song" the single, built around a simple but utterly enervated chord, again sees Yorke revel in the idea of immersion, addressing the world as if from underwater as synth strings trace mueton shapes across the sky. On "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors", Yorke sounds like Cher murmuring in her sleep with her vocoder still switched on, as electronic hailstones rattle against the panes.

"You And Whose Army" is anti-Blair, with Yorke coming on like an incredibly listless, latterday Spartacu, goading Tony "and your cronies" to "take us on", before the song swells into a formidable barrage of balladry, as if imagining the final collapse of Blair's "Holy Roman Empire".

"Knives Out" sounds like a reprise of one of "Paranoid Android"'s sections, with Greenwood's wheeling and gliding guitar tunings providing a pleasant interlude before "The Morning Bell/Amnesiac", built around what sounds like an old Beach Boys riff dredged, Titanic-like, from the bottom of the sea, barnacles and all, with Yorke repeatedly wailing somnabulently "Release me..."

"Dollars And Cents" moves at an ominously light, jazzy pelt, with Yorke sarcastically urging us to "Be constructive..." before growling menacingly "We are the dollars and cents... and we'll crack your little souls."

"Hunting Bears" and "Like Spinning Plates" are deliberately inconsequential slivers of noise, the latter propelled by the sort of sound achieved on those plastic coloured tubes Seventies kids used to whirl around their heads in the playground. Last and perhaps least is "Life In A Glass House", in which, against a new jazzy/New Orleans-ish cacophony of horns, clarinets and so on which sound like the mocking chortles of the populace, Yorke seems to lament his own lot. "Don't talk politics and don't throw stones/You should turn the other cheek". Its persecuted note smacks of the petulance Yorke's detractors accuse him of. Most of us would be happy to swap our houses for the actual one Yorke doubtless lives in.

That apart, however, Amnesiac makes the same sort of sense as Kid A. It's the sound of a counter-culture wheezing through an iron lung on a life support machine. Its wasted, (meticulously) disjointed bonelessness is a subtle form of reproach to the rude bodily health and deluded upfulness of the status quo. Its indinstinctness is not laziness or inarticulacy but an oblique strategy. For coherent analysis and protest against the forces of global dominance that prevail right now, Yorke deliberately points us elsewhere - to Naomi Klein's No Logo. Radiohead's job is to express a condition, the present-day condition of Disgust - near-terminal, if Amnesiac is anything to go by.

One day soon, the likes of Radiohead may well indeed disappear completely - and then the world, though it doesn't know it, will be sorry.

-David Stubbs

Uncut
07.01