“Positioning Amnesiac within Radiohead’s Discography”

June 7, 2021June 7, 2021 by Mike Beal

*“You’re so misunderstood

You’re so misunderstood”

– Wilco

It is with great satisfaction that I now recognize the 20th anniversary of Amnesiac, Radiohead’s fifth album.

Discussing favorite albums by this band tends to be a pretty spicy enterprise, too — they differ strongly from Nirvana and Modest Mouse in that it’s almost impossible to find two people with the same concept of what their best material is. In the endeavor’s more volatile moments, too, things have happened like fights breaking out over what the time signature [1] is in “Pyramid Song.” For the record, I got an A+ in music theory at IU without ever opening the textbook and I haven’t the foggiest clue about what it is.

And just, meeting people who say Kid A and In Rainbows are their best albums — I become way too pi**ed off about this to purport as a mentally healthy person. Particularly, Kid A seems like the usual trendy favorite, baffling seeing as it’s an album composed of such jolting variance in style as to all but obfuscate its identity as a coherent statement.

Ok Computer is essentially a pop album, albeit one obviously packed to the gills with sonic, structural and lyrical liberties, or eccentricities, if you prefer. The same goes for Pablo Honey and The Bends. Kid A, then, their fourth full-length work, marks the point in their career when they ceased being a pop band and began just basically deliberately trying to fool us on every album, or so it seems. Although Kid A is typically embraced as electro, or a departure from rock, to me it represents more of a statement in prog rock, particularly if the most important songs on it are “The National Anthem” and “How to Disappear Completely,” which is at very least a firm possibility.

Amnesiac, then, is where the band fully pulled the cup and dove into the electronica pool, ironically using really cheap, shi**y sounding programmed drums for the endeavor, in the process [2]. Now, as I allude to in the preliminary quotation, Amnesiac is a very “misunderstood” album, at least in my opinion (the alternative opinions being certain elaborite hypotheses like “It sucks” or “It’s weird”). Similarly, anyway, to how none of these Kid A oafs ever explain why the He** they make it the best Radiohead album, none of the Amnesiac haters ever explicate their exact beef with said LP.

Well, how any human being could hear “Pyramid Song” and not immediately deem it the greatest recording of all time is entirely beyond me. It’s a song with this majestic, spellbinding beauty, able to accumulate an undeniable energy and vibe using way less volume than the band had on former ham-handed projects lke “Paranoid Android” and “The National Anthem.” It’s delicate. You poke it and the whole thing falls apart (in a good way).

Along these lines, “You and Whose Army?” is ingenious for a roughly similar reason — there are no wasted parts, the song is extremely pliable and artistically efficient. Further, with this tandem of two tracks, Amnesiac in my opinion materializes as the first Radiohead album to feature two songs which are both artistically sovereign, like in the sense of making sense and no other band doing that thing, and also so stylistically divergent from each other. “High and Dry” and “Fake Plastic Trees,” for instance, on The Bends, are both legendary tunes but are essentially conceived in the exact same style. The same goes for the pop projects on Ok Computer like “Let down”; “Karma Police” and “No Surprises.” That was an album way more catered to MTV than lots of Radiohead fans would likely admit.

I consider the most important song on Kid A “Optimistic” but it’s Our Lady Peace in indignant clothing, basically. “Pyramid Song” is a towering piano dirge the likes of which nothing had manifested in the history of music prior (with Grizzly Bear probably beholden to the closest artistic approximation thereof later). “You and Whose Army?” is similarly piano driven but from classically trained prog we go to verse/chorus gospel, shaped, of course, true to Radiohead form, in a very unusual structure of this kind of awkward, moribund verse bleeding into what’s essentially like a never-ending chorus type deal featuring an infectious mantra and the surfacing of something like an anthem, without question. And whether or not you agree or connect with the song’s lyrics semantically is beside the point — musically, it’s original and crisp, and takes us to a place in our ears we’ve never been. This is a dire epidemic in music criticism, incidentally — the idea that music has to be “about” something to be good. We’ve all but completely lost track of how to map artistic meaning.

Hail to the Thief, Radiohead’s next album after Amnesiac, is a very strong effort in my opinion and it is such for that same point of containing sovereign, quintessentially “Radiohead” songs that are birthed within a wide array of styles. One popular favorite on this rocker would be “Backdrifts” and I can’t help but agree that that’s a great song and a singular achievement in alternative rock, thanks in large part to that trippy guitar effect Johnny Greenwood employs on it, whatever it is. “Go to Sleep,” then, the very next song, is snarky alt-pop like “Just” but is just way more textural and earmarks a band with a heightened, increasingly inspired dedication to grafting the sound of an album rock track. I’ll even go so far as to say “Where I End and You Begin” [3] pushes the boundaries of the art form even more, with “There There” obviously a staggering bastion in phrasing, tension and release and generally the sort of vituperative, ominous rock dirge we needed so dearly during George W. Bush’s reign of terror.

Respectively, regarding all things subsequent, In Rainbows (2007) and A Moon Shaped Pool (2016) are both albums that featured a lot of old songs — really listening to “Nude” and “Decks Dark” you get a sense that they were written around the time of “Fake Plastic Trees,” as good as they certainly are, in their own regard. The King of Limbs is pretty listenable and commendable for its penchant for entrenching itself within genre, but it also dies by this sword for being short on memorable hooks. But with Ok Computer the undeniable titan, I’d position Amnesiac behind only this and Hail to the Thief, for reasons related to what I said earlier about representing a multifarious ride through an LP that also finds shoes in coherency for the simple fact that they all just seem like Radiohead songs, a discourse which would of course beg the question of why “Radiohead” has not yet been embraced by Merriam-Webster as an official adjective.

[1] For all you music theory nubes, a time signature is the rhythmic makeup of a measure, which is one modicum segment of the music. Basically, it denotes the amount of beats that will be in each measure as well as what type of beat, concerning time duration. The concept of measure is similar to that of least common denominator in algebra, in a sense.

[2] I actually recognize one of the kick sounds in “Packt Like Sardines in a Crusht Tin Box” as this super-annoying “fruit kick” thing on Fruity Loops, a selection even I used to avoid in my hopelessly avocational hip-hop days.

[3] I realize I’m not employing the auxiliary titles that accompanied these songs on this album. Life is just too short to do that sometimes, basically.