Chairman of the dashboard

Radiohead
Airbag/ How Am I Driving?
(Capitol)

Rating: 7/10

'PEOPLE ARE AWARE, BUT not that bothered.' 'The more you drive, the less intelligent you get.' 'If you don't ask me out to dinner I don't eat.' Nope, these aren't juicy excerpts culled from the Loser's Guide To Chatting Up Ladeeeeez. Although, in a fit of coincidental activity, they are statements lifted from the sleeve of this here compact disc by those notorious beaming Radiohead boys.

Damn fine artwork it is, too, featuring shagged dog stories, deadpan cartoons, Noam Chomsky quotes and a profoundly unquestioning questionnaire booklet directed at 'the' 'kids' and hence destined for intense sixth-form common rooms across the land. Fair play to the chaps, obviously: ever since their debut Drill EP, circa '92, Radiohead have performed a sterling job of proving that commercially successful music needn't be simply about facile beauty and empty melody. They were pop's wise owls with their petulant scowls, and now this odd little beast is yet more power to Radiohead's impressively angular collective elbow.

As it so grumpily states on the front cover, "This mini-album is aimed at the USA." Now, we know that the Yanks mightily pissed off the 'Head by daring to, like, actually buy 'Creep' in their thrillions, but is that really enough justification for behaving like the proverbial Sardonic Youth? In 'Palo Alto' Thom Yorke grumps, "Meet the boss/Meet the wife/ Everybody's happy/ Everyone's made for life", and on several other occasions you get the weird feeling that Radiohead should have come from Omsk instead of Oxford, so surly is their mistrust of... well, most things, really.

Even better, if you considered OK Computer to be a tad difficult, much of Airbag/How Am I Driving? is going to be impenetrable. 'Airbag' is obviously the main commercial attraction here (and no, we won't mention the fact that the peachy 'Let Down' hasn't been a single. No sirree. Not at all.), but there is much added retail muscle in the form of no fewer than six previously unreleased tracks, some of which even have tunes.

'Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2)' is the other main attraction here, bringing together the unusually raw with the rampantly orthodox as Yorke counts the band into a blitzkrieg of bionic guitars and the longest guitar solo this side of summer 1975. Elsewhere, the morose keyboards on 'Melatonin' would have Spielberg weeping KFC bargain buckets, 'Meeting In The Aisle' is an instrumental which could easily be described as 'a bit moody', so we will, and 'Pearly' and 'A Reminder' are dense, but obviously not in the intellectual sense, daaaaah-link.

An in-betweener sort of release, unquestionably, but if this is in any way an indication of future Radiohead releases then the faithful can rest assured that Thom's hum will persist in being complicated, cutting and a few kookies short of the full cuckoo's nest. Loads more rattle and glum to come, in fact.

Laugh? Goddarn it, I nearly bought a Radiohead import...

Simon Williams

N.M.E.
15.05.98