Kid B

Radiohead drop the other shoe with Amnesiac

by Matt Ashare

There's a curious little disclaimer set in small print on the back cover of the new Radiohead CD, Amnesiac (Capitol): "Store away from direct sunlight, preferably in a dark drawer with your secrets. See inside for details." Okay, well, maybe it's not exactly a disclaimer per se. Maybe it's more of a joke -- an inside joke shared with the hundreds of thousands of Radiohead fans whose purchasing power sent the band's previous album, the willfully difficult Kid A (Capitol), shooting to the top of the Billboard Top 200 the week of its release last fall. But I can't help reading it as more of a warning directed at the hundreds of thousands of other music fans who participated indirectly in Kid A's precipitous descent from the top of the charts in the weeks that followed by opting not to purchase an album that, despite its impressive debut, stalled short of the million sales need for platinum certification. It is, after all, surrounded by other random notices that could be interpreted as warnings: "KEEP QUIET," "OVERHEAD CABLES HUMMING," "UNDERGROUND BUNKERS."

Or, Caution: the music inside bears little or no relation to our hit song "Creep" or any of the other guitar-based alternative-rock-style songs we recorded prior to Kid A. We don't even really like that music or the attendant trappings and stardom that come with it anymore. We're terribly sorry for any inconvenience and/or disappointment this may cause. Please feel free to purchase a copy of the latest Coldplay CD -- they sound a lot like we used to.

The first thing you should know about Amnesiac is that all 11 of its tracks were recorded at the very same sessions that yielded Kid A -- i.e., for most intents and purposes, it is Kid B. The second is that, contrary to rumors circulated in the wake of Kid A, the band didn't save all the guitar-based alternative-rock songs they'd written at the time for Amnesiac. In fact, it now seems safe to say that, for the time being, Radiohead have purged themselves of any and all desire to rock in the traditional sense. The good news, however, is that if Kid A was the prodigal offspring of Radiohead's alienation, prone to aimless bouts of unfocused melancholy and passive-aggressive fits of cryptic techno diddling, then Amnesiac is the problem child who's worked through some relevant issues and reached a degree of clarity. Not sure whether that's something you can remix into an album after the basic tracks have been laid down or whether Radiohead just saved the best for last in the hope that, after suffering through the bleak soundscapes of Kid A, listeners would greet the spare rays of light that break through the clouds on Amnesiac as the dawning of a brand new happy day, but this is definitely the more satisfying of the two collections.

Like most of Kid A, the first few cuts on Amnesiac sound as if they could just as easily be tracks from a Thom Yorke solo album -- there's very little evidence of the kind of musical interaction you get even when a group like U2 go on a techno excursion. Guitars are, for the most part, absent. And Radiohead have two guys who certainly used to play guitar -- Johnny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien. In fact, the songs are defined more by what's missing than by what's there. The big improvement over Kid A right off the bat is that Yorke's distinct voice -- and he does have an unusually evocative voice -- is clearly present. A skipping programmed beat and nearly subsonic bass line form the foundation of "Packt like Sardines in a Crushed Tin Box," the disc's opening number. The title is the most poetic part in terms of lyrics, and it's a little much. But Yorke's the kind of singer who can get an awful lot of mileage out of a simple line like "I'm a reasonable man/Get off my case." And he does. The mixture of paranoia, world-weariness, and annoyance he conveys with just those eight words is nicely complemented by the confusing and at times claustrophobic polyrhythms that punctuate the skeletal arrangement, and that's what songwriting is all about, even on the avant-garde edge of the pop universe.

Real, halting piano chords, some jazzy drumming by what would seem to be a human drummer, and strings arranged but not played by Greenwood (so that's what he's been doing!) are the main musical attractions in "Pyramid Song," which finds Yorke reaching what would appear to be some kind of mystical state -- "Jumped into the river/What did I see/Black-eyed angels swam with me," is one of the song's few lyrics. Amnesiac then takes two steps back with the stop-and-start glitch techno of "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors," a techno melange replete with robotic vocodered vocals and some spliced-in piano playing, before moving forward again with one of its more trad tunes, "You and Whose Army?" (Actually, Thom, the expression is "You and what army," but in the heat of battle it's sometimes hard to keep those things straight.) The melody Yorke sings at the start of the song is close enough to "Karma Police" to coax a sigh of sweet relief from even the most cynically discouraged former Radiohead fan. But it's just a tease. Nevertheless, "You and Whose Army?" does prove that the band aren't above putting guitar chords, piano, and a 4/4 drum beat together with a hook or two and a rousing climax, just as long as Yorke's allowed to slur most of the lyrics into unintelligibility. I'm pretty sure he does say "Roman Empire" at one point, though I can't be certain why.

Those of you who remember Radiohead as an unusually gifted two-guitar band who were excited enough about six strings to turn the punk adage "anyone can play guitar" into a pretty good song on their first CD will be encouraged by the presence of not one but two guitar-based tracks on Amnesiac. The first, "I Might Be Wrong," features a sharp, almost twangy blues-based, string-bending riff that relentlessly repeats behind words that I'm not even going to guess at until I see a lyric sheet. The second, "Hunting Bears," is just a solo piece for some skeletal chordal picking, and its best feature is its length: 1:59. Better yet, a pair of tracks anchoring the middle of the album more or less qualify as fully formed compositions, with lyrics that reflect more than just abstract malaise and some degree of musical interaction. "Knives Out" has bass, drums, and both acoustic and electric guitars all working together while Yorke bids someone a wistful if not so fond farewell: "I want you to know/I'm not coming back/Look into my eyes/I'm not coming back." "Morning Bell/Amnesiac" is yet another slow-moving, languidly layered track, but this one seems to have a point: Yorke is offering impressionistic snapshots of a collapsing marriage when he sings lines like "You can keep the furniture" and "Cut the kids in half," and there's a chilling edge to the repeated falsetto refrain "Release me."

There are other compelling moments on Amnesiac, just as there were on Kid A. The closing track, "Life in a Glasshouse," improbably makes good use of what sounds like a New Orleans brass band. And there are points where the disc just gets annoying -- "Like Spinning Plates" is more of what you might call formless glitch techno, though it really sounds as if they were running a tape of everything but the vocals backward. Fortunately, Yorke is one of the rare singers who can and does convey a great deal just by opening his mouth. But there is a difference between unarticulated emotion and unarticulatable emotions. The former arises when someone's either not trying or is incapable of accessing and processing what he or she is feeling. The latter are the powerful feelings that often surface when someone's trying to deal with strong emotions. Too often on Amnesiac, though much less so than on Kid A, it just seems that Yorke isn't trying. And that wouldn't be so disappointing if he weren't so damn good when he does try.