Amnesiac - Radiohead

It’s the same old story, you wait ages for a bus and then two come along at once. The Radiohead story in recent times has been eerily similar to this because after their three year hiatus after OK Computer, Radiohead have now released two albums in the space of 10 months. I've had an MP3 copy of this album for some time now, but MP3 as a format doesn't really do music much justice. Now I have the hard evidence to draw from and believe me when I say there is nothing quite like it. It’s hard to find a way to view this album. It was recorded during the long and fraught recording sessions that produced Kid A, so is it a sister, a progression, or ...  Read the complete review

***CLAng- ClAnG – clang… The opening track spins into your ears in a drunken orgy of dizziness and claustrophobia. Soon, the electric hubbub slides in and Thom’s fragile voice beckons, almost threateningly: ‘I’m a reasonable man; get off my case…’*** Amnesiac, for any cave dwellers or Texans, is the follow-up album to the immense best-seller, and winner of the Most Controversial Record of The Year award, Kid A. For a lot of those Bends addicts, listening to Kid A was like watching their girl/boyfriends sleeping with a Turkish estate agent. Even massive fan and lead singer of a small American band, Michael Stipe was ...  Read the complete review

Now before I go headlong into this opinion it's best to note how I stand on Radiohead and their albums. I wasn't too bothered about Pablo Honey I didn't really hear it until after the Bends, which incidently I thought was excellent, in turns strong, catchy and fun while at the same time powerfully melancholic. When OK Computer came along I wasn't really listening, so let it drift by me as the music buying public and industry went mental. When I finally did sit down to listen I almost cried with joy at the importance of the album...It was damn good! Too good to follow? No, once you have produced an album of such quality an artist ...  Read the complete review

There's doing things the easy way, there's doing things the hard way, and then there's doing things the Radiohead way. Amnesiac, recorded during 2000's Kid A sessions, was nearly the Oxford, England band's undoing as they squabbled for over a year about everything from track listings to drum machines. All the under whelming Kid A ultimately proved was that wholesale assimilation of foreign genres is hardly experimental, and that if they ever inaugurated techno karaoke nights at the local pub, Radiohead could do a mean Autechre. So Amnesiac threatened to either rattle with leftover ideas or show the group retreating to the kind of ballads which the likes of Coldplay and ...  Read the complete review

Already known as "The Commercial Album", or better, the album where Radiohead would go back to some decent songwriting and the label 'guitar band' could be aptly used again. Two months before its official release, the complete album - of those songs, half were already known because they had been played at various concerts the previous summer, and as a result of whic decent quality copies were available online. What does the album sounds like then? As weird as "Kid A", absolutely not more (or less) commercial than that album. Probably the only reason that it was labelled that way is the mere fact that singles are going to be taken off it, ...  Read the complete review