WEEKEND VIDEO / A FAVORITE FROM 15 YEARS AGO
Radiohead’s debut album Pablo Honey was something of a curate’s egg — parts of it were superb, others tended to sound like indie filler. With “Creep” still shackled firmly around their scrawny necks, the singles that preceded this second album suggested a radical change of direction.
The windswept “Planet Telex” is the first sign that things are different now in Radiohead’s world. A spacey, guitar-heavy epic with Thom Yorke sneering over the top — this most definitely ain’t average indie anymore. The crashing opening to “The Bends” proves that, with the monstrous guitars bursting out of the speakers.
The pairing of the ballads “High and Dry” and “Fake Plastic Trees” together allows the gentle songs to complement each other. Lyrically, they are polar opposites.
The former satirizes a vain and facetious man (“Two jumps in a week / I bet you think that’s pretty clever don’t you boy”) who ultimately is losing what matters (“The best thing that you had has gone away”) as the slow, acoustic accompaniment gives way to a harder sound.
Meanwhile, the latter is an attack on consumer culture and the homogenization of everyday life to the point where even the other character in the song is my “fake plastic baby.” Yorke’s lyrical shift from the personal subjects of their debut to the more universal themes here gives the songs more weight, rather than sounding like teenage bedroom traumas.
“Bones” is another transcendental rocker, with Yorke on particularly spiteful form on the chorus. It’s excellently contrasted by the lullaby beginning of “Nice Dream,” before that too mutates into a fiery ball of guitars.
“Just” is possessed of another worldweary outlook “You do it to yourself, you do” while “My Iron Lung” tries to throw the albatross of “Creep” off the band’s shoulders in a mid-section maelstrom of guitars that sounds like Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box.”
However, the real highlight of the second half of the album is “Bulletproof.” Sounding like a lullaby set in space, its subtlety provides an ethereal volte-face away from the rock bombast. Closing track “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” is an acoustic ballad, with some spellbinding guitar work laying the foundation for another examination of the pressures of success — “this machinery bearing down on me.”
The dull “Black Star” aside, this is a magnificent collection of songs that flow together as a seamless whole, with some much going on in the details. Pallid indie wannabes? Not any more. Welcome to the first record of the rest of Radiohead’s life.