At last the weekend has
arrived! I am hopeful for a very
uneventful one, in the same way I am hoping my next record is better than this
one was.
Disc 432 is…Amnesiac
Artist: Radiohead
Year of Release: 2001
What’s up with the Cover? A child has apparently doodles on a frayed piece of
fabric. This cover is uninspiring,
pointlessly obtuse and overwhelmingly awful.
The CD booklet inside is filled with 26 more pages of equally gag-worthy
deconstructionist crap.
How I Came To Know It: As I’ve noted in
previous Radiohead reviews, I’ve known this band since the beginning but Sheila
is more into them than I am. “Amnesiac”
is either her drilling through their collection or (more likely) me buying it
for her because I know she likes Radiohead and assume that, like me, when
someone likes a band they want to have every album by that band.
How It Stacks Up: We have seven Radiohead albums and when I reviewed
“Hail to the Thief” back at Disc 214 I said I’d be optimistic and say it
was the worst. Sadly, my optimism was
misplaced. “Amnesiac” is the worst
Radiohead album I have heard. With three
still to review, I sincerely hope this is as low as the bar goes.
Rating: 1 star
Thom Yorke and Radiohead, you are
so clever with sound – so why does this album make me want you to take a long
walk off a short pier? Because being
clever with sound doesn’t mean making listenable music.
Music is for listening, guys, not
for demonstrating how niftily you can use the sound of some object striking an
empty oil drum. Or whatever the hell that
sound is that starts this album off with the exceptionally poorly spelled
track, “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd
Tin Box.” Get it the words are
crushed, like the sardines! Yeah, I get
it, and it is stupid. Use your words,
gentlemen. Not that it matters what this
song (or most of these songs) is called, since the title bears little
resemblance to what they’re about.
“Packt…” goes on into a strange and pointless journey into sound,
with Thom Yorke’s alien voice singing “I’m
a reasonable man, get off my case” over and over again. It came maddeningly close to a song at that
point, but instead of developing it into something we were treated to a wide
array of sounds – some computer generated, some sampled, none of which go
anywhere. I’m a reasonable man,
Radiohead, but seriously, get off my case.
And that is pretty much a
microcosm of this whole record. Full of
half-started songs that are fully developed into some 21st century
incarnation of the Art of Noise, only completely stripped of any opportunity
for the listener to say “oh, yeah!” in
a deep voice, and devoid of any breathy chick-a-chick-aaah!s.
I have a great deal of respect for
Radiohead as a band. They are clearly
chock-full of talent, and their first two albums (“Pablo Honey” and “The Bends”) are excellent. They even
have a few in later years that are worth your time. On “Amnesiac” I could only find one song worth
my time, “I Might Be Wrong,” which
has a groovy guitar riff (I suspect sampled, but so what?) and Thom’s ‘falsetto
in water’ sounding voice fitting in with a strange beauty that is the band at
their best. Radiohead at their best is
pretty good, too.
However, as a record “Amnesiac” is
not Radiohead at their best. This record
is self-indulgent sound-making. It is
like electronica jazz, without the soul that jazz brings even the most obtuse
songs of that genre.
Songs like “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” made me feel like I was intercepting
signals from an alien spacecraft on my short wave radio. I guess I should’ve expected that, with a
title like “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors”
– yes “pulk” is not a typo. In addition
to being pointless, this song has a rolling bass line that on headphones makes
it feel like your ears are popping from an elevation descent. How clever, Radiohead – you really recreated
that unpleasant sensation! Now how about
some music?
There are those among you that
will simply say that I don’t get this stuff, or that my musical knowledge is
too limited to give a meaningful review of it.
You may be right on both counts, but I’m not a classically trained
musician, nor am I a computer technician.
I’m just a guy who likes music, and listens to a lot of it, giving my
opinion.
However, desperate for
understanding I broke my usual self-imposed Modernist approach to music reviews
and looked the record up on Wikipedia, where, unsurprisingly, the album had
received reams of critical attention.
For the above mentioned “Pulk/Pull
Revolving Doors” there is even some background on how they made the song on
a Roland MC505 sequencer. Band member
Colin Greenwood is quoted as saying
"You give the machine a key and
then you just talk into it. It desperately tries to search for the music in
your speech, and produces notes at random. If you've assigned it a key, you've
got music."
Um…not in my world you don’t. You’ve got a science experiment; maybe you’ve
even got an interesting exploration of new sounds that could one day become
music. But the proof in what you’ve got
is how listenable it is, how emotionally evocative it is, how it speaks to your
soul. Most of the songs on “Amnesiac”
speak to my soul about as much as a phone ringing, or the buzzer that tells me
when my laundry is done.
Of course, the one song I liked is
“I Might Be Wrong,” and the title is a fitting reminder that art is different
for everyone. Some people must love this
record – it went #1 in Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany, and #2 in the
United States. It is also a companion
piece to “Kid A” a critical darling of a record that I’ve yet to review. After listening to “Amnesiac” I can’t say I’m
looking forward to it.
Best tracks: I Might Be Wrong
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