This week I re-listened to Radiohead’s first album Pablo Honey, made when singer Thom Yorke and company were 20-year-old babies, and I was surprised how it leapt from the speakers. It’s not an underrated classic, but it’s certainly not the dismissible dreck the band seem to believe it to be. It’s a middle-tier Britpop album.
The songwriting isn’t quite there yet – the album’s monster single “Creep” is its most fully formed song – but the sounds, dynamics, and energy belong to a band that’s ready to take over the world. It’s no surprise that their follow-up album, today’s Heck Record The Bends, proved to be a world-bestriding colossus, as well as one of the best level-ups in rock history. Pablo Honey primed Radiohead to explode like dynamite.
But it also did something special that has become increasingly rare in Radiohead’s discography: Pablo Honey rocked.
I’ve meant to write about Radiohead since this column became a regular part of my life, but I never quite found an angle until this week. The band is arguably the critics’ choice for the most important rock band of the last 30 years, and a million other writers have written a billion other words about them. Today, you’re going to get mine. And I’m going to write about how they’ve ever so gently let me down over the past decade or so, while somehow becoming the perfect sonic wallpaper for our current times.
But first, let’s celebrate greatness.
Radiohead somehow fused influences as disparate as Pixies, the Smiths, Björk, Brian Eno, Autechre, Talking Heads, U2, and Squarepusher into platinum selling albums. With 1997’s OK Computer, they turned millenarian anxiety into anthemic rock songs. With Kid A and Amnesiac, they successfully transformed into a totally new band, shedding their rockstar skin and embracing the machine that had so recently terrified them. With 2007’s In Rainbows, they introduced the Name Your Price download model to music consumers. I bought it for $10.00, a lot of money for me then, which means me and my roomies probably had to drink off the floor shelf that week. (Taaka? Popov? Do they even make that vodka-flavored poison anymore?)
During that era, Radiohead may’ve been one of the best rock bands and one of the best electronica acts at the same time. That’s like leading the NBA in rebounds and steals in the same year. If modern rock had a Michael Jordan (and I’m not sure rock, music, or art works that way), they might’ve been it.
This week, I listened to their whole catalog from beginning to end, 1993 to 2016. Since 2016, the Radiohead industry has dropped anniversary reissues and rarities compilations, the members have released a shitload of solo albums, and Yorke and guitarist/composer/whatever Colin Greenwood have released three Radiohead-esque albums as The Smile with drummer Tom Skinner. Although the band has toured together, they haven’t released any new music in nine years. As it stands, A Mirror Shaped Pool is their last album.
Maybe that’s for the best.
A Moon Shaped Pool was greeted as a return to form after the band’s first mildly chilly reviews with The King of Limbs. But Moon is an odds and ends collection in everything but name. Its best songs, “Burn the Witch” and “True Love Waits,” date back twenty years, and the newer material feels lethargic and anhedonic.
While Yorke has made spazzy dance music with Atoms For Peace, jittery laptop music by himself, and some honest-to-god art rock with The Smile, with Radiohead, he’s mostly consigned himself to writing miserable minor key ballads as the rest of the band play softly around him.
I’ve complained before that Radiohead plays far too many slow ones to fast ones. A Moon Shaped Pool is all slow ones. Personally, I prefer the reheated Kid A of The King of Limbs. At least that album insinuates dance music. But, honestly, both of their last two albums are a bit of a snooze.
In the early days, Radiohead built their music into sonic skyscrapers. In their middle period, they smacked those skyscrapers with wrecking balls, blew them up with car bombs, and made music out of the wreckage. Now it feels like they’ve cleared away the wreckage and are rebuilding boutique condominiums. Their music has become bespoke, artisanal, and small.
For a band that used to be celebrated for having three guitarists, you’re lucky to hear one of them playing on their most recent songs. They’ll probably be playing an acoustic, too.
If early Radiohead spoke to the anxiety coming down the pipeline, their most recent work speaks to the sewer we’re in today. All the bad stuff that Radiohead foretold happened! We live in a depressing techno-dystopia where computers run our lives, and oligarchs own our freedom.
Instead of raging (or at least rocking) against the machine, Yorke has the following sentiment to offer (from “Daydreamers”):
Dreamers
They never learn
They never learn
Beyond the point
Of no return
Of no return
Then it’s too late
The damage is done
The damage is done
Welp, fuck me too, Thom. At least you’ve got a shitload of money and a wildly successful artistic career to make up for your broken dreams.
If it sounds disingenuous for me to complain about Radiohead’s lyrics being depressing, or whiny, or defeatist…okay, point taken. A tiger can’t change his stripes, and Thom Yorke can’t help sounding pretty and sad.
But the music doesn’t have to sound so pretty and sad too.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve not only come to appreciate the craft and care it takes to make something sound polished, I’ve come to respect the energy and vitality it takes to make something sound gnarly. I don’t think I’m the only person who came around to appreciating both Fleetwood Mac and Napalm Death in his 30s.
I’m pretty sure you could cue up “True Love Waits” right after “Landslide” on any jukebox in the country, and no one in the bar would blink an eye.
And that’s because at this point Radiohead don’t make rock music, so much as they make adult contemporary music.
Don’t get me wrong, unlike most of the soft rock, quiet storm, easy listening, and not-too-sexual R&B that has made the format such a radio mainstay since the 1970s, Radiohead do not make “happy” music. But that’s totally fitting for today. Unlike the go-go ‘80s or the “End-of-History” ‘90s, when “Walking on Sunshine” might’ve been an appropriate song to follow a news report about the collapse of the Berlin Wall or the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, that type of aggressively happy song will get your radio punched.
No, a song like “Daydreamers” is perfect for today’s climate.
Arpeggiated piano chords play over wisps of reverb. Yorke is gorgeously bereft:
This goes
Beyond me
Beyond you
A white room
By a window
Where the sun comes
Through
We are
Just happy to serve
Just happy to serve
You
Strings enter. Yorke’s voice is reversed. The song crescendos on a major chord and then fades back into nothingness.
This is the sound of defeat… and the sound of acceptance.
Sure, our dreams went el busto, but at least we’ve got a patch of sun to lay in. This is a song for the cogs in the machine – and we’re all cogs in the machine. The best we can do is be “happy to serve.”
This is music for the medicated.
Radiohead is the perfect drug band, if the drugs are antidepressants. It’s ironically appropriate that their music is typically so sexless as it’s difficult to bust when your bloodstream is full of SSRIs.
One truism about any rock band is that it’s harder to play slow than fast, and Radiohead have spent the past two decades trying to prove that they can play as slow as possible. They’re like a comic who feels obligated to show their dramatic chops instead of making us laugh.
Don’t get me wrong, Radiohead have always given us techno dirges, bloodless piano ballads, and paranoid lullabies, but they also used to rock out. For every “Pyramid Song” we would get “The National Anthem,” for every “Exit Music (For a Film),” a “Just.”
Not anymore.
Anyway, listen or relisten to The Bends. It’s fantastic. And unlike even other masterpieces OK Computer and Kid A, every song bangs. What a great band. I miss them.
