Radio Head (Amnesiac - Radiohead)

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Product:	Amnesiac - Radiohead
Date:	03/08/01 (6 review reads)
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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 Travis have turned into their whine-in-trade since Radiohead last disappeared into the studio. Instead, Amnesiac crackles with ideas digested, of creative despair forged into a kind of hope.
If Radiohead sound more like a band amid this album's click tracks, it's because they've recognized their strengths as performers and used that knowledge to shape new enthusiasms. The misshapen beast that was Kid A wore its gimmicks like extra limbs. Here the avant-gardism's are integrated into the overall atmospherics — from the clanking gongs introducing "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushed Tin Box" to the mournful New Orleans-funeral march finale, "Life in a Glass House." Guitarist Jonny Greenwood, who in the past has carved Radiohead's sound with processed effects, jangles like the Smiths' Johnny Marr on "Knives Out" and makes some of his most unabashed rock gestures on "I Might Be Wrong." But rhythm is the key here. Standout track "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" shuffles percussive tracks like the house anthem at a disco where everybody does the Thom Yorke Shimmy (Step One: Plant feet; Step Two: Wiggle hips; Step Three: Twist head until close to snapping off), while drummer Phil Selway creates a sense of unease with jazzy fills and sudden snare snaps on the high-tension ballad "Dollars & Cents."

>Yorke himself has learned to regard his nemesis the Modern World as a subject for satire rather than something to run from and whimper softly about. Now he burbles more like a dormant volcano than a dyspeptic HAL 9000. "You and Whose Army" reinvents "Karma Police" as a challenge to England's robotic ruling Labour Party, with Yorke castigating "You and your cronies," while "Knives Out" wittily tries to find comfort from a failed relationship through materialism. "He's not coming back," he sings, "Still there's no point in letting it go to waste." It might also be the first song in which Yorke — whose lyrics can often read like a sleepy lecture on Jean Baudrillard — has ever asked for his listener's trust: "Look into my eyes/ It's the only way you'll know I'm telling the truth."

Radiohead have remembered how to feel, and do so without relying on the arena rock bluster of The Bends, the Orwellian remoteness of OK Computer or Kid A's pretence as a sort of MC Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. That's why Amnesiac sounds like their best album. The group has again satisfied its experimental urges, and done so without compromise to a marketplace that wants another OK Computer. But that doesn't mean this famously reticent band has forgotten its listeners, as it threatened to do with Kid A's half-baked hermeticism. In fact, Amnesiac finds Radiohead crawling out of their incubating pods and addressing their audience in a more personal — and sophisticated — manner than they've ever dared before. Welcome back, guys. We didn't realize how much we missed you.

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