Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Amnesiac

Heh, I like this record most of Radiohead's sometimes.

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Radiohead
Amnesiac
[Capitol]
Rating: 9.0

After months of waiting, and several tentative release dates, Amnesiac finally hit store shelves last Tuesday. Since last October, we've been hearing that this album, recorded during the same sessions as last year's wildly experimental Kid A, would serve as a return to the band's mid-90's roots. Now we come to find it was all a lie.

Not that it gets me down. As far as I'm concerned, Kid A is Radiohead's defining achievement. A total departure from the conventional rock formats of OK Computer and The Bends, Kid A drew from far more abstract and obscure influences than its predecessors. Whereas previous outings captured echoes of U2 and Pink Floyd, Kid A took what it could use from the Talking Heads, Can, Talk Talk, and modern-day IDM artists, and combined it with Radiohead's irrepressible originality and sparkling, alien production. Whether you liked the end result or not, the fact that they had the balls to challenge mainstream insipidness with such heroic creativity was admirable.

That said, Amnesiac is about as close to The Bends as Miss Cleo is to Jamaican. And within the first ten seconds of its opening track, "Packt like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box," the band crushes that rumor like a bug in the ground. Sparse, clanging percussion evokes abandoned swingsets. Keyboards whir to sonorous life, humming resonantly. Guitars are curiously marked absent. Production-wise, the track could have nestled cozily alongside Kid A's strangest moments, yet its melody is stunningly more infectious than even that album's height of accessibility, "Optimistic." Amidst chattering synths and twisted metal, Thom Yorke casually insists that he's "a reasonable man," and politely intones the album's most quoted lyric: "Get off my case."

The clattering, confrontational "Packt" segues awkwardly into "Pyramid Song," a sweeping piano-and-strings ballad, whose unusual timing is difficult to nail down until Phil Selway's live drums give perspective on the punchdrunk rhythm. Yorke croons some of his most poetic lyrics since "No Surprises," inspired by passages from Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. Amidst swelling orchestration and Satie-esque piano chords, Yorke croons a dream-like scenario in which he's visited by black-eyed angels, and his past and future loves.

4/4 traditionalists will take an immediate liking to the very OK Computer-ish "Dollars and Cents," whose lyrical content is strikingly similar to the anti-government, anti-corporate themes expressed on the 1997 classic. Jonny Greenwood's minimal, warped guitarwork and distant string arrangements float celestially over brother Colin's menacing basslines and Selway's delicate drumming. "Knives Out" is another OK Computer-style reverbathon, replete with strummed acoustics, chiming electrics, and a not-too-tasteful rehashing of a prominent guitar line from "Paranoid Android." Great melody. However, they've fucking used it before. The song also loses points for containing the line, "Shove it in your mouth." Really, Thom.

Similarly disappointing is "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors." Powered by a gritty industrial beat, the song's intentional abstractness, for the first time ever, seems forced and caricatured. Thom's MacinYorke vocal treatments never seemed terribly groundbreaking, and here, the gimmick has gone utterly limp. Yorke's lyrical content is also at its most unchallenging, as he educates us on the many varieties of doors that exist, over oafish, programmed beats worthy of a Cleopatra Records sampler. Elsewhere, "Hunting Bears" is a two-minute instrumental clip of aimless guitar noodling that shoots for Neil Young's Dead Man soundtrack but comes off as a cutrate Wish You Were Here outtake. A track like this is meant to segue into a related piece of music; instead, we're flung headfirst into the completely dissimilar "Like Spinning Plates."

If nothing else, Radiohead have always realized the emotional impact of a stunning album closer, and Amnesiac offers two. Sitting side by side, "Like Spinning Plates" and "Life in a Glasshouse" are so vastly superior to the album's other tracks that the album's few misteps are easily forgiven. "Spinning Plates," while a much better fit for Kid A, is nonetheless one of Radiohead's most affecting tracks to date. It opens with a digitally simulated "spinning" sound, disorienting reversed keyboard, and subtle keyboard pings. The song hits its peak when Yorke's indecipherable backwards vocals unexpectedly revert to traditional forward singing during the mournful climax, "And this just feels like/ Spinning plates/ My body's floating down a muddy river."

But if "Like Spinning Plates" would have been a fitting apex for Kid A, "Life in a Glasshouse" is entirely suited to the eclectic Amnesiac. Rather than creating a unique, Frankensteinian amalgamation from fragments of other genres, Radiohead instead target a style of music that hasn't been touched for decades: Edison-era big band. In the process of adapting the archaic jazz sound to polyrhythmic piano chords and rock lyricism, Radiohead touch upon an incredibly unique sound that could potentially inspire an entirely new genre.

"Glasshouse" is most easily (and most often) likened to a New Orleans funeral dirge-- probably because it's not far off the mark. Largely inspired by Louis Armstrong's "St James Infirmary," this track is the least like the others on Amnesiac, and easily the record's winning moment. When, amidst rueful trombone, tumbling clarinet, and the crushingly emotive trumpet of longtime BBC session musician Humphrey Lyttelton, Yorke insists, "Of course I'd like to sit around and chat/ Of course I'd like to stay and chew the fat," and follows it with a minute of wailing "only, only, only... there's someone listening in," the intensity is indescribable.

Despite the heights attained by much of Amnesiac, I prefer Kid A for a number of reasons. Quality aside, the questionable sequencing of Amnesiac does little to hush the argument that the record is merely a thinly veiled b-sides compilation; Kid A played out as a cohesive whole that evoked panic and paranoia as well as surrealism and disorientation. Still, Amnesiac's highlights were undeniably worth the wait, and easily overcome its occasional patchiness. Now if you'll pardon me, I have to go untie DiCrescenzo.

-Ryan Schreiber
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