
We’ll start this review off with your music lesson for the day…or year, maybe, since I don’t do these as often as I intend to. Anyway, today’s topic is the delay. Here I’m not talking about the guitar effects pedal where what you play is delayed slightly for effect, but rather the delay in music theory.
This type of delay is when the movement in the melody lags behind the movement in the harmony. This usually happens at a cadence, the end of a musical phrase, where the harmony resolves to the tonic (that sound that lets you know a song, or phrase, is completed). In the case of a band like Radiohead, this means that everybody in the band will move onto the phrase’s closing chord, but Thom Yorke will continue to sing his previous note which was a part of the prior chord, before resolving to the tonic a beat or two later. It creates a sense of delayed gratification…like when you finally get with that girl from class after you’ve spent years repressing your mutual urges, releasing them only in occasional, light flirting in the hall.
It’s a relevant lesson for Radiohead’s 1993 debut, Pablo Honey, because you can hear Yorke developing skill in his melodic delays, something he would have perfected by the time the band released their third album, OK Computer.
While later Radiohead has mastered that kind of emotional manipulation, it’s fun to listen to how the band started off. This album finds them with a much more straightforward rock approach, with a bit of an edgier, more raw sound that, while good, doesn’t quite get as huge and symphonic as their later work would. The guitar distortion is kind of the standard rock distortion you’ll find in countless bands, and the song structures, despite some complexities here and there (the “She’s running out the door” part of “Creep,” for one) are fairly straightforward, too. They remind me a lot of early-ish U2, and Yorke’s held notes and mild warbles are definitely influenced by Bono’s likewise emotional style from that period.
Lyrically, “Creep” is not an aberration on this album, as most of the songs are about loneliness, timidity, sadness and anger towards ex-girlfriends and unnamed jock-like villains, and every other clichéd emotion the skinny indie kid should feel. And on the rare occasion that they do break out of that mold, it’s in some mix of ecstatic celebration or ironic sarcasm. In “Anyone Can Play Guitar,” you get the feeling that Yorke believes in the transformative power of creating art, but is trying really, really hard not to, or maybe just guarding against the trappings of rock stardom: “And if the world does turn and if London burns/I’ll be standing on the beach with my guitar/I want to be in a band when I get to heaven/Anyone can play guitar and they won’t be a nothing any more.” From isolation to reflections on rock gods…it’s like a Smashing Pumpkins album with good music.
Great music, in fact, but I didn’t want to put that phrase too close to that band’s name for fear of upsetting the powers that be in our universe.
Rating:

Mixers: “Creep,” “Anyone Can Play Guitar,” “Blow Out”
Non-keepers: “Creep (Radio Edit)”
Filed Between: R.E.M. (Automatic For The People) and Radiohead’s OK Computer