M station -----> review Radiohead Amnesia 06/01

Reviews

Radiohead - Amnesiac
(limited edition CD and book)
5/6/01 EMI Records Ltd.

'Amnesiac', the latest release from Oxford band Radiohead, is a collection of recordings made on location at the same time as their recently released hit album 'Kid A'. After a long period of silence, the sudden creative explosion of two new albums is refreshing in its exploration of some quite experimental territory. The sounds are very new, being electronically manipulated with effects that verge on electroacoustic or acousmatic art. It becomes apparent why the choice of a sample from the American electroacoustic composer Paul Lansky became an essential inclusion (although very much in the background) in the title track - it shares common ground. Fans of the previous albums will not be disappointed, though, or find this new exploration too much of a diversion from the traditional Radiohead sound that we know and love - there are still the echoes of pain, depression and alienation and the beautiful and haunting melodies that, for me, somehow have the power to grab one by the heart in a way that no other music does.

The success of Radiohead's previous release 'OK Computer' came to be at the expense of great personal suffering in the hands of the worldwide music publicity machine. In an interview with Q magazine, the band's melancholic lead singer Thom Yorke described the awesome state of depression that he experienced between 'OK Computer' and the release of 'Kid A': "New Year's Eve '98 was one of the lowest points of my life. I felt like I was going crazy. Every time I picked up a guitar I got the horrors. I would start writing a song, stop after 16 bars, hide it away in a drawer, look at it again, tear it up, destroy it...I was sinking down and down." In the interview, Yorke attributes the suffering that he experienced as being a direct result of the unreality of being the focus of so much publicity. He continued in the Q interview to discuss the digitally altered publicity photographs he produced with his "mate Dan" for the release, depicting each band member with modified features and pale eyes:

The experiment he says, was because he's "fed up of seeing my face everywhere. It got to the point where it didn't feel like I owned it. We're not interested in being celebrities, and others seem to have different plans for us. I'd like to see them try to put these pictures on a poster [giggles]". [from www.qonline.co.uk] Radiohead have opted this time to be quite reclusive around the release of the new album, in order to protect themselves from a repeat experience - there will be no singles or music videos accompanying the release of 'Kid A'. The interviews quoted above are from two of three interviews that Radiohead will do to promote the record. Instead, the band have produced a series of 10-40 second downloadable ads, available from www.radiohead.com.

In an interview with Juice magazine, the second of only three interviews that the band gave for the release of 'Kid A', Yorke "defends this stance by comparing the ads with video clips, saying that videos are basically little more than promotional tools anyway anyway. "

"Although we owe them a lot, the whole MTV thing and what it did to music just got way out of hand," Yorke elaborated. "The thing that really did my head in was going home and turning on the TV and the ads for f***ing banks and cars being more like MTV videos than the MTV videos. It seemed like there was nowhere to go." "

Radiohead.com is a fascinating website, presently containing some of the cover art featured in the limited edition book which accompanies the release of 'Amnesiac'. Unfortunately, by the time of writing the limited edition will have almost disappeared - I was lucky to be able to catch a copy by being in the right place at the right time - I wandered into a record shop in Paris at the moment of its release. It is quite a fascinating book: a treasure, but perhaps also a Pandora's box of disturbing images created by Stanley Donwood and 'Tchocky', featuring pencil drawings, dark stick figures and shadowy demons, and the lyrics to some of the songs printed in smashed and partially scrubbed out type. The cover logo is of a roughly drawn crying man, inconsolable and seeming to be lost within an imaginary constellation of stars. The book isn't without humour though - the disc itself is contained in a little library card pocket, labelled "Nosuch Library, Catachresis College", and stamped for issue in a strange random order of dates up until 06 Nov 2005!

The songs of 'Kid A' and its companion album 'Amnesiac' capture the awesome and quite overwhelming feelings of depression and detached unreality in a very powerful and intimate setting of brutal honesty. Highlights include "Like Spinning Plates" and the reworked version of "Morning Bell/Amnesiac". Full of beautiful melody, but disturbingly personal in their accounts of what it really feels like to experience such feelings of alienation and despair. "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box"[sic] follows on where the loops and beats of "Idioteque" (from 'Kid A') left off, another anthem to Yorke's suffering at the hands of MTV and the drive of commercialism and the international publicity machine. His feelings of complete detachment and an inability to connect with the unreality of this world that he was living in become a theme that runs through both albums, captured in lyrics like "I'm not here, this isn't happening", which repeats on and on through the song "How to disappear completely" ('Kid A'). The only ray of hope in the unremitting, yet always beautiful melancholy appears in the title track of 'Kid A', a dedication to the birth of Yorke's first child.

The rhythms of 'Amnesiac' are irregular, the sounds are raw and jagged, fractured by electronic alterations; it is not slick like its sister album 'Kid A', but this is by no means a criticism of the production, which for both asbums is absolutely fascinating. Listening to an album produced from pieces that never made it into the first release gives one a feeling of looking over the composer's shoulder, or of peeking into a sketchbook, it is a unique insight into the creation of a most original album, and into the experiences that caused the band to seek such a new departure. The albums are not for the fainthearted, the listener cannot help but be faced in the eye by Yorke's experiences of the last two years. It is at times frightening to realise that someone has really felt that much pain, but the honesty in the lyrics and in Yorke's cracking voice is also beautiful, and indeed empathetic for anyone who has shared that kind of experience.

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