Miss Piggy Lunchbox

Coffee makes this album worse. I felt like I wanted a bit of an energy boost heading into Friday night, so got me some Starbucks before giving this album my focused listen, and I enjoyed it far less than I had been before the caffeine infusion. But now I know definitively that this is a sleepy, nighttime album.

Amnesiac was recorded at the same time as Kid A, but wasn’t released until the following year. There isn’t a song on here that wouldn’t sound out of place on Kid A, or vice-versa, and the albums sound similar: they are both extensions of the cold, spacey feel of OK Computer and both travel further from the guitar-based rock of the band’s early days. They both push boundaries and have their share of “sonic experiments,” as opposed to songs.

The main differentiation is that this album is more of what Kid A was. It goes further afield from traditional rock song structure, instrumentation, melodies, and rhythms. “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” wouldn’t sound at all out of place on an Ipecac record. This album also doesn’t cohere as well as Kid A did. In other words, it’s not necessarily a 45-minute work in and of itself, and I don’t find the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts.

Part of that is because I just don’t need all of these songs. Sure most of the album is being kept, and nothing clunks really heavily, but I don’t think I’m that much better off for having heard “Pulk/Pull Revovling Doors,” “Hunting Bears” (another exercise in sound composition), “or Life In A Glasshouse” (which features a New Orleans dirge-y horn part).

With this record, which is definitely not a starting point for Radiohead, the band just might be right on the verge of pushing things too far. “Knives Out” is one of the best songs here (just a tad too repetitive to be mixed), and it also probably the single Amnesiac song that would have fit best on The Bends or OK Computer. According to singer Thom Yorke, via Green Plastic, though, the band was really bothered by the fact that it was so “straight.”

We just lost our nerve. It was so straight-ahead. We couldn’t possibly do anything that straight until we’d gone and been completely arse about face with everything else, in order to feel good about doing something straight like that.

The band’s commitment to advancing the state of popular music is to be commended, and will surely be their legacy, but in 2001 it seems they may have been losing their compass for what was legitimately good, which is further evidenced by the fact that this is easily the best cover- and liner-notes-art of all of their albums thus far, and I’ve simply come to the conclusion that they intend it to be awful.

Rating:

Mixers: “Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box,” Like Spinning Plates”
Non-keepers: “Hunting Bears,” “Life In A Glasshouse”
Filed Between: Kid A and Ramones (Ramones)

Tags: 2001, 4 lunchboxes, CD reviews, music

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 20th, 2008 at 3:13 pm and is filed under CD reviews, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.