Radiohead: The Bends
Radiohead has the largest positive difference between quality of music on an album and the quality of that album’s artwork. This has been empirically verified in the MPL laboratory. We arrived at the following equation: Musicawesome – Artsuck = Numberlarge. If you could judge a CD by its cover, Radiohead would be derided like Britney instead of being the popular, influential giant that they are. I can understand now why they decided to release In Rainbows over the Internet first: no cover art.
I guess if every artist has some amount of suck in them, then cover art is the place you’ve got to put it. And there’s no suck anywhere else on this album, so this may indeed be the formula Radiohead uses when picking their cover art. “Let’s make sure it sucks bad, guys, so that the music is as good as possible.”
The only sonic problem on here is that they’ve got a bit of the same-key, same-tempo problem going on, as the band moves from the more straight-ahead style of Pablo Honey to the clean, crisp, futuristic style of OK Computer. They make a stop in dystopian future for The Bends, a depression-infused opus that Pink Floyd might have made in the 60’s if they wrote shorter songs back then.
The band still exudes a lot of U2 influence, especially in the vocals, but this is more Achtung Baby, whereas Pablo Honey was more The Joshua Tree. In addition to U2, there are a couple of new key elements here. One is dissonant abrasiveness, which they do well enough to prompt significant clockwise turning of the volume knob when they get to the most aggressive parts of “Planet Telex,” “Bones” and “My Iron Lung. They are starting to get their symphonic legs, a la Pink Floyd. “Fake Plastic Trees” is their first real attempt at the long, slow build, and they absolutely nail it. If you weren’t aware of what followed this, you’d say this was a band at the peak of their craft.
Rating:
Mixers: “Planet Telex,” “(Nice Dream),” “Black Star,” “Sulk,” “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: Pablo Honey and OK Computer
Tags: 1995, 4.5 lunchboxes, CD reviews, music
July 15th, 2008 at 7:24 am
[...] MPL Laboratories created the equation that describes the relationship between the quality of Radiohead’s cover art and their music, we [...]
August 1st, 2008 at 7:27 pm
[...] the albums should be receiving the high ratings that they do. I’ve gone back and looked over my reviews for Radiohead albums to try to find out where this impression originates. One option is that I [...]