Radiohead - Kid A and Amnesiac

Radiohead - Kid A and Amnesiac

Published in 2000 and 2001

Wikipedia - Kid A and Wikipedia - Amnesiac

With OK Computer a resounding success both commercially and critically, there must have been a temptation to rest on the solid ground that they had created, seemingly from nowhere. The experiment in forward moving rock had been a success, and to keep moving further away from what they initally were would, to a casual observer, be an act of madness.

However, a careful observer would dispute this interpretation. Perhaps it would have been easier for Radiohead to continue on the epic album track. Perhaps they would be known as the new Pink Floyd and be able to put out long meditations on whatever struck them. This, however would have been musically unsatisfying.

There is a part of the human experience that drives us to move to new things. There is also a partnthat drives us to stay static. This is the tension in which decisions are made. If you are not bold, you will stagnate in the regularity, but if you change too much, you lose a sense of who you are.

Radiohead, as a creative entity walks down this path. The risk of alienaion of their fans is balanced by the movement into new areas and new fans. By remaining a band that is dictated by creativity over sales, Radiohead has not stagnated and has not lost itself.

Kid A is a record that sounds completely different than any of the previous works of Radiohead. The music has been created with an ear for defying expectations, but also with the intent of creating an album of extraordinary power.  This allows the band to get away with more than most, but it rigidly locks them into producing something good.

I am going to attempt to not go track by track for this one, simply because it is going to sound very similar to my OM Computer review. Let us be clear, there is no bad song on this album, and the great songs are perhaps some of the greatest ever made.

Let's start with The National Anthem. This is a song that is the closest thing to a pure rock song on the album. I am contractually obligated to mention that the bass line was written by blah blah blah who cares. It is a simple bass line, it was written at a young age. It simply kicks ass. The bass line uses it's simplicity in the strongest way possible, by making it a driving force in the song. Every moment that the bass line is going in the song, there is a percieved forward motion that allows the music to sound more urgent than it's tempo.

I am also contractually obligated to mention the horns at the end. Many people have said that this ruins the song, and the use offhe horns is a cheap stunt to create cacophany without any investment. They may have a point, but I like to look at them another way. As the horns enter, we hear the blasting and bleating as a departure from the sound of Radiohead. The music is residing in a space that we had not been in before, and as a reult of this change, we are taken out of passive listening and into active listening. By activating us in this way, we're enticed to compare the sounds to other songs with horns in them. This is not ska, this is not jazz, this is not classical. The musical space is a purely Radiohead defined realm, and the rules are defined by them.

By allowing the horns to attempt to overtly play indiviudual parts, we allow them to be seperated and individualistic. These competeing strains are a call back to the message of the song, which ishat even in a crowd of like minded people, one can feel so alone. By looking at it this way, the end of the song is neither cacaphony nor organized, but a collective effort of individuals attempting to create something beautiful and shared on the form of harmony, missing their mark, and forming a new kind of harmony instead. The distraction of the music is a powerful reminder of the individual.

The triumph of the collective and individual nature is obviously important to this album. Thom Yorke has said that the title is a reference to the first human clone. This achievement would be a triumph of humanity, a collective effort, but perhaps an individual tragedy. The child at the center of it all would not understand why he was what he was, and nit understand that he was important. This person would be detached from humanity by virtue of being one of fhe greatest achievements of the species.

This emotion is perhaps best reflected in How To Disappear Completely.  The use of acoustic guitars, the brishig of the snare and the wandering bass line is incredibly private sounding. The lyrics are from the perspective of someone who is either unnoticed or noticed too much. As the chorus states, I'm not here, This isn't happening. The song itself is an escape for the mind of the singer, whether or not his body is physically able to move or not. The reflected feelings of alienation and wishes of escape and freedom to move freely is completely in the character of this album, and is clearly the point of much of it.

By exploring both of these conflicting sounds, Radiohead opened it's world up to a both a wider and narrower audience. Those who could find one song that they liked was expanded, but those who were locked in and completely taken with the album were narrower.

By actively ignoring the impulse to grow broader, and infact concentrating their efforts in the opposite direction, Kid A is a triumph of a band in transition, not a static band. Where they were going was past the reaches of where they had gone before.



Amnesiac starts with an incredibly percussive beginning, and the first tone is held back until about 30 seconds in. This song is one of the more accessable, but it is remarkable for a couple of things. 1. The guitar has all but disappeared. It has been replaced by synths and percussive sounds. 2. The sounds are both otherworldly and electronic, but there is a deep humanity to the track. 3. It is not rock music, but some kind of hybrid.

The most arresting song of Amnesiac is the next song, Pyramid Song. It is arresting because the song follows a traditional format in an untradtional way. The song has a moving piano line, that makes a huge impression on the listener immediately. The piano, however plays the percussive or bass role in the song, repeating the same chords over and over, and allowing the voice and various other instruments to take the melody.

Pyramid song is one of the few songs that seems delivered straight from another world. The parts seem to be obvious, a stripped down piano that builds to a huge climax and then releases slowly. But the song just slowly eats itself in such a way that the entirety of it is swollowed up, leaving the listener grasping at the end of the song, just to find somewhere to hold onto.

As we move farther into the album, the sonic landscape is taken up by incredibly diverse computerized loops and sounds, giving the impression of a spiky and distopian far future. The sounds of the album are rarely warm and inviting, or at least don't inspire the same level of pathos in you as some off of OK and even Kid A.  Even You and Whose Army uses a vocal effect to put space between the listener and the singer, keeping a dreamy distant feel to the whole affair.

The entire album is incredibly diverse, and a necessary step to their canon. This should be listened to as compainion prices, and should be seen as such. The sheer amount of purely interesting material is a good reason, but the better reason is that the whole band is astoundingly different than their other records, and the experimentation settled in a place of incredible beauty.

Next time on the Catalog Project -
Hail to the Thief, and Why it isn't a good album for beginners.

"Jesus, Krieger, you're still taping bum fights?"
"No, I've moved on to something much . . . darker."
Matt

Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere

Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere

Published in 2006

Wikipedia

Welcome back to the Matt loves Dangermouse in all of his forms variety hour, I'll be your host and chief lover of Dangermouse, Matthew "Oh, My God, I Love Dangermouse" Butler, Esqizzle.  This hour, we will be looking at the most impressive collaboration Dangermouse has made, and the only band that made me leave a job in the hands of my sister to go see them.

It would be an understatement to say that this was one of my favorite albums of all time.  This is in the running for the best album ever made by humankind, for Matthew Butler.  I could not tell you one song that I don't like, and I love all of them, in actuality.  Our contestants for song of the album are as follows.

Crazy - A sweet little number, recalling some of the great spaghetti western inspired songs, such as Clint Eastwood and others, one of the most popular commercial songs that I like ever.

Gone Daddy Gone - Awesome funky cover of an already awesome song? Sign me up!

Just a Thought - One of the weirdest tracks on the album, it has the strangest suicidal lyrics on any mainstream awesome song.

Necromancer - A great what the fuck song, it's impossibly well produced and Cee-lo knocks the mood out of the park.

Storm Coming - nominated for the first 5 seconds alone, the stutter sells it, and then it is followed by some of the most melodious production of the album.  Also, that 5 seconds is just part of an amazing intro.

And finally, The Last Time - a dancey number that closes out the album, it's just an astonishingly well made song, and one of my favorites to sing along to.

So, to recap, on an album of 14 tracks, six of them are in the running for best track of the album, and all 14 are in the running for second.

Allow me to drop some history here.  I bought this album because of two things. 1. Dangermouse, obviously. 2. Crazy was perhaps the best crossover hit that I had heard made in my lifetime.  For future aliens, this means that in the summer of 2006 you could literally go nowhere without hearing this song, and for once, that was a good thing.

I went in expecting to be blown away by the production, and I ended up becoming a Cee-lo fan for life.  The amount of personality on display in these 14 tracks is endearing in a way that even charismatic people would envy.  No matter what song he is doing, it sounds like he is pouring his whole being into making it the best performance of that song of all time.  Seriously, pick a track, and you'll hear a man's soul on display.

This disc didn't leave my CD player for months.  Months!  Incubus came out with a new album, and I had difficulty removing Gnarls Barkley!  It was the soundtrack to that part of my life!  How many albums have that kind of an effect on people?

I'm actually shocked that it took me this long to get this album again.  I just recently realized that I hadn't listened to it in months, since the great wipe and the desire to put new music on my iPod.  Listening to it now, I cannot understand why it wasn't the first thing that I downloaded and put on my iPod again.  I'm kind of an idiot.

The production is superior, the songs are great, the voice is awe-inspiring, and the album is fun.  It's like your favorite food, wrapped in your other favorite food, pushed in a blender, made into a milkshake, served with five guys, and the flavors mix together like beauty itself.  It's like raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiin, on your wedding day.  Wait, no, it's not like that last one.  Seriously, it's good.

Look, I'm not saying that we're not friends if you don't like this album, I'm saying that you're not a human being.  I don't care what genera of music you like, I don't care if you hate everything made after 1965, I don't care if you are made of swiss cheese, you will find something on this album that will enchant you and completely win you over.  This is not just Not Optional, it's almost an enforced torture to know that people out there have not listened to it.  It is simply a perfect album.

And I haven't even written about the (perhaps) even better sequel yet.

"The Plot Thinn-ens!"
Matt

PS. Hey, I know I've been bugging you a lot, but I wanted you to know that you should Give Phil Five, so I can get a new heart, to replace the one that I stuck on Dangermouse's doorstep with a knife through it with a note saying "You."  Thanks to Jack Handy for the idea!

Radiohead - OK Computer

Radiohead - OK Computer

Published in 1997

Wikipedia

OK Computer marks the moment in Radiohead's career where they stepped off the path and found a goldmine. The album begins in a wholly different way than either of their previous albums.  We are treated to a cello and bells, playing a melody that would sound completely out of place on either of the previous records.  This is the first indication that we are now in a new space.

Airbag, the albums first track, is one of the greatest songs to lead off an album ever.  It is a wide open, strikingly beautiful track, that is inviting and interesting.  The themes of the album are hit on, but the song is just well made and well performed.  No longer are we relying on pure guitar and bass to convey the music, there are synths, strings, drum machines and much more.  The guitar is present, and the bass is pounding, but they are awash in extra touches around the main parts.

Lyrically, Airbag is a sing along song about a car crash, the effects of modernity and the interaction of man and technology.  This is the theme of the album.  In a world where nothing is separated from technology, what happens is recorded, seen, processed and filtered through this technology.  Music is a powerful thing in this world, because it seems to be the one place where technology cannot touch, but as Radiohead shows, it has already permeated the gap, and is now in charge.

Paranoid Android is another classic song.  The bass line is beautiful, the acoustic touch brings an interesting sound on top of it, and to also have an electric guitar come in just adds to the depth of the song.  The music is well performed, the sounds are beautiful, and Thom Yorke screams and shouts with the best of them.  The song progresses from one point in musical space to another, first starting as a bass and acoustic song, developing into a rock anthem, slowing down into a ballad, and returning to the anthem.  These tonal changes make the song develop into much greater than the sum of its parts.

In general, Thom Yorke alternates between a breathy whisper and singing right at the edge of his vocal range, threatening to  either go into falsetto, or playing just on that side of the vocals.  This means that his voice is dynamically attempting to move up and over a certain point, and the failure of the voice to do so intrigues us and brings us further into the song.  The exploitation of this natural feature of the human voice is one of the most brilliant things that Yorke can do.

Subterranean Homesick Alien is a song about longing for a greater experience.  The desire to see something from a different perspective and from a different place is a common one in Radiohead's music.  The voyeuristic elements are also interesting to look at.  Both the aliens and the singer are trying to present the people back home with a different perspective, the aliens in the form of home movies and the singer in the form of words.  Both of these experiences highlight the superficial elements of relating experience to another.  The movies, by definition are only an image of the experience at that time, which divorces them from the time and place that they are being viewed, and can only be experienced fully through the memory of creating them, while the narrative is flawed in that in the end, it must sound crazy to the other people around.  Once again, disconnection from human beings reigns.

Exit Music (For a Film) is another song about attempting to find connection and failing.  The singer is attempting to escape with someone else, and the song is presented as a narrative between this character and the singer.  The quietly whispered quality of the vocals and the layers of music present a strangely conspiratorial sound, that makes the song sound like it is being sung to you alone.  Even as the song expands, it remains a shared experience between you and the singer, a quiet rebellion, huddled in the woods around a fire, having escaped from an oppressive thing.  

There are two parts to Exit Music (For a Film) of equal importance.  First is the Wake and Escape part.  This establishes the narrative quality.  The song is communicated directly to us, the listener, and we are treated as the child in the relationship.  The imagery that is called to mind is of a hushed night time escape, running away from an oppressive force, that has held on too long.  The escape is cathartic and  triumphant.

The second part begins just after the line "Sing us a Song, a Song to keep us warm, there is such a chill, such a chill." At this moment, the heavily distorted baseline comes in.  The song that is sung is one of rebellion toward the force that once held us.  It is a revolutionary anthem, sung between conspirators against an oppressive figure that doesn't present itself to them.  However, this triumphant quality is stamped out by the end of the song, with the repeated refrain "We hope that you choke, that you choke, that you choke" sung in a quiet, high voice, like a child hiding in the woods.  The epic rebellion is only between this child and the original singer, and the hope is one of futility and sadness.  Sitting outside, escaped from the house, not yet to anywhere that could take you in, the end sounds like the oppressive darkness chokes off the lone voice in the cold world.

(Did that just get really dark?  I think it was a little dark.  My fault.)

Let Down is a lovely song, mixing the classic Radiohead sound with a lovely wash of noise effect.  The background has a constant sound of cymbals, which allows the guitar and vocals to ring out over the background, and even the bass comes through clearly.  There are several small repeated samples that make an impact, and the added noise is not distracting, but adds to the wash in a way that makes it interesting.  The main through line, which sounds like marimba to me, but might just be an electric piano, gives a great sound to the whole thing.

Perhaps the most popular song off of OK Computer, Karma Police was ubiquitous on alternative radio for a year or so.  It's a haunting song of great sing along lyrics.  The music once again takes advantage of the layers available, allowing a wailing vocal track in the background.  The piano based chorus segment drops well, and brings the listener in closer to the band.  The space created by the re-entry of the drums allows the effect to occur over and over again.

The bridge, with it's cries of "for a minute there, I lost myself" is well done, sounds like the other parts, and allows a strange guitar non-solo.  The guitar solo sounds more like a repeated alarm sound, not a solo, but it comes through at the moment when you expect the solo to occur.  It is then dwarfed at the end of the song by the lead in to Fitter Happier.

If I were to point to something that bothers me from this album, it would be Fitter Happier.  I think I understand why they used it, but now, over ten years later, the idea of a MC Hawking solo in the middle of this album seems absurd.  However, the background music is pretty incredible, and it allows this not to stick out like a sore thumb.  It is less distracting and thematically fits, I just wish that it wasn't so obvious.  Having human words come out of a robots mouth is a little too easy for me.

Electioneering  (I believe that the title comes from a Kurosawa film called Ikiru, which might be my favorite film of all time.) is a great rock song.  It's simply amazing, driving rock.  It is the closest thing to a normal song structure on this album, but it is just a driving monster song.  The music is well done, the guitar is awesome, and the drums just kick.  It is perhaps the easiest song to just listen to without context, but in context, it gives it a certain power that it is so simple.  The song structure is simple, but the song is not.  The lyrics are powerfully crafted, and the music is too.

Climbing Up the Walls is a pretty great song.  I think the beginning is more powerful than the end, and that it loses it's way somewhere halfway, but I think that it is a pretty fair representation of the insanity and desire that consumes people.  It's a fantastically well done beginning though, and totally fits inside the album, because the outro of buzzes and noises brings us into the prettiest song on the album

No Surprises is a perfect song.  The song is light and poppy sounding, with incredibly dark and strange lyrics. It has a lullaby quality to it, and a bit of a sing songy vibe to it.  The music is just perfectly beautiful and completely detoothed, which allows the lyrics to be biting and vicious.  If it is a lullaby, it is the lullaby that is sung to budding anarchists and criminals, a song of theft and destruction, a prayer to the god of the thieves.  It's also wonderful.

Lucky has a dreamlike quality.  The slow tempo allows the vocals to languish in the time, making the music that much sweeter.  The chorus kicks in with one of the most moving and singable lines from the album, with the note on "pull" almost being drawn out of you, involuntarily.  The song is performed with a tightness and clarity that many other artists lack.  It's a beautiful moment of dreamy clarity.

The Tourist is even slower in tempo than Lucky, and is almost so slow that it forces you to anticipate the beat.  The chorus of the song directly addresses this with "Hey man, slow down, slow down, slow down."  The main vocal sections are sung in harmony between two voices, allowing the snaking between these voices to create tension, and the music to interact with the voices.  It's a beautifully done piece of music.

So, why is OK Computer one of the most important albums of the last twenty years?  I think it is because it looks both forward and back.  It has a structure that is similar to the Dark Side of the Moon, which was a meditation on madness, while this is a meditation on Technology and Humanity.  I think that if it were not for this album, the musical landscape would have lost the diverse epic structure, and I think that we would be worse off for it.

I also think that it is important to remember how different this was than The Bends and Planet Telex.  "We have removed the traditional song structure, and are no longer aping the people who inspired us."  The imagery of stepping off the path is a good one.  The first two albums, while incredibly respectable pieces of work, were in line with what other bands would have done.  For that matter, nearly every album is similar to every other album that artist has done.  When we make something successful, the "that but more" principle comes into effect.  This is why some people get locked into structures, and instead of using the structure to build something new, they just build the same house over and over again.

Radiohead, by stepping this way, opened up an entirely new path for them to go.  Few bands have tried to go in such a different direction, and even fewer have succeeded, but this is a stellar effort.  To adopt this kind of change shows maturity in a musician, and it allows them to move to even newer places.  OK Computer was the first step, but the next one would be even further.

"That's a lot of scalps,"
Matt

PS. Yeah, another one bites the dust!  This will be posted on Wednesday, so, whenever you check TAP, make sure to check other times too.  Not only does it bump my view count and thus my ego, it also means that you get more TAP!

PPS. GP5!

PPPS.  Stay tuned for more of the Catalog Project!  Up next, Kid A and Amnesiac and blowing your mind.

Radiohead - Pablo Honey and The Bends

Acknowledgements: I'd like to thank Stacy Sherman for suggesting one of these albums to me. I'd also like to thank Sam Porter for his great insight into the band and his willingness to talk music while we lived together.

Here is the plan:

Over the past 25 years there has been no band that has remained a part of the culture of the English speaking world as much as Radiohead. To look at their career is to look at two things: first is to see a frozen representation of a moment in time. The second is to see a band pushing against that time, making strides forward musically and culturally. I believe that by looking carefully at the music of Radiohead, great insight can be gained about the culture prevelant at that time.

If you'd like to know more about Radiohead, wikipedia has a pretty good article. Also, the bands website gives a good impression of heir aesthetic.

In these album projects, you will be getting my thoughts on these albums. Pablo Honey and The Bends, OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief, and In Rainbows. It is going to be very important that you listen to the albums, if not for my point to become clear, then for the sheer fact that you need to hear them.

Over the next couple of months, I hope to lay out my general understanding of Radiohead's importance and why they might be my favorite band ever. I hope that you'll join me on this trip.

Radiohead - Pablo Honey and The Bends

Published in 1993 and 1995

Wikipedia - Pablo Honey and The Bends

Part I - Pablo Honey and The Bends

Let's put these albums into context. These are two of the formative albums by Radiohead. They are also their weakest efforts, by the incredily high standards of their later albums. They give great insight into where the band is going to end up, and the moments of genius are fantastic.

No work about these two albums could be considered complete without talking about Creep, so let's use that as a starting point. As the second track off of the album Planet Telex, it is the track that defines the early sound of Radiohead. It continues to be one of their most popular songs, and if there is one Radiohead song that everyone knows, it is Creep.

The first time I heard Creep, that I can remember, was in my fathers 1989ish Toyota Celica. Needless to say, it was kind of a peice of crap car, but it had a pretty good radio, and we would listen to it constantly. I'm sure I had heard the song before, but this was the first time I really remember listening to the lyrics and understanding them, in a naive way. It was a song that I fell in love with, as so many did, because of the open display of hurt and longing that was on display. The mixture of a soft whispering verse and a screaming chorus was exactly what I needed from a song at that time.

As I grew up, I realized more and more that the song was not just about hurt, but also about the appearence of the singer through anothers eyes. The fear of inadiquacy is the through line of the whole song, but the more it is listened to, the more it becomes apparent that he has never expressed these feelings to the 'you' of the song. This alienation is a theme of Radiohead's music, and will come back in the future.

While I quite enjoy the rest of Planet Telex, for the most part, it is just pretty generic rock. Thome Yorke has an amazing voice, Johnny Greenwood plays a great guitar, and the bass and drum parts are solid. Anyone Can Play Guitar is a great example of the band doing it's best to sound like U2.  This is not a problem, but it doesn't really do all that much for me.

This was the state of music when Radiohead made it's debut. Guitar, bass, drums, vocalist, playing loud and emotional songs to what sounds like a huge stadium. Everyone wanted to be U2 and sell out huge stadiums. However, as Creep is evidence of, there was a backlash coming, and soon, it would no longer be about pure volume, but about closeness and the use of space.

I think the best way to think about Planet Telex is to think about it as a baseline for Radiohead. They could have continued down this path of solid rock, but they went a different direction.

The Bends is a different beast, but is a child of Planet Telex.  The first track is a testiment to that, not just in the fact that it is named after the album, but also because it takes what that album did and moves it up a notch. The band has added the piano that will be important moving forward, and we start to hear the distortion that will become increasingly important to Radiohead.

The second track, The Bends, the albums title track, is a lot more like the original album.  An interesting thing to consider is the direction that radiohead would have gone if it hadn't gone the route that they had. I have a feeling that they would have occilated between Planet Telex style experimentation and something like this. One thing that I must emphisize is exactly how much I like this album. I think that it is well made and well produced, but, in the scheme of where they progressed, it's tough to love at the same level.



High and Dry is one of those songs, and the third on the album. It's a song that just screams wandering around in A cold and indifferent city to watch the sun rise in an indie movie because it is too good. It is musically well done, the lyrics are clear, and the ideas are well executed. It's maybe the perfect song of it's time.

Speaking of timeless songs, have you ever seen something sad in a movie or tv show with a budget? Then you have heard the next track on the album. Fake Plastic Trees is a masterpeice that has become so connected with crappy movies, that it makes me sad to listen to it. It's so well made, heartwrenching and beautiful that my heart hurts when I have to think about how it's been taken from his album.

(Side note: I know I am kind of harping on this commercialization thing, and that deserves some explination. I am the kind of person who associates things easily. So, let's say someone takes a song and puts it into a movie.  I will then store that in my memory as a moment that defined the song and the movie. Sometimes, this is an amazing pairing, like (most obvious example in history) Steeler's Wheel in Resivoir Dogs, a moment that would be less if one subtracted any part of it. This is why the Radiohead thing bugs me, because they never use them well, especially this album. To prove my point about how obvious the uses are: Entourage. Convinced? You should be. Now back to writing about music.)

Fake Plastic Trees sounds a lot like Creep to me, in that it deals with the minor heartbreaks and deaths tha
are experienced every day. The beginning ofthe song evokes a lonelyness expressed so well that it is still effecting me after three listens in a row. Following High and Dry is also a stroke of genius. The song sounds so different that it creates a tension on the record that holds for the rest of it. We are now on the hit parade.

Bones is a retrn to a more classic song, which could be a U2 song. However, for a complete education on radiohead, it's important, because it has some distortion, and Thom Yorke is starting to experiment a lot with the fallseto that becomes more important.

(Nice Dreams) is a great song, which follows the heavy distortion of Bones with a quiet and delicate sounding acoustic riff. There are a bunch of layers in this song, giving time to a beautiful violin part and some wonderful backgrounds. The voice is firmly in the middle distance, with contrastig lyrics giving different sentiments, and just a lovely song, all together. (just a lovely song).

We switch back to more of a rock vibe with Just, a pretty great song. It's a very sing alongy song for me, and it is a very excellent rock song. I think the hit song aspect makes it a little easier to get into, and the solos, if basic, are perfectly okay.

We go back to the more weird with My Iron Lung, a very delicate and well composed song.  The title is somewhat interesting to me, just because it is the first indication of the man and machine theme that rules OK Computer, but mostly this is a basic Bends era Radiohead song. Consistantly good, but it doesn't seem to be reaching for much more than basic compitence. The distorted sections are good and rock and roll, but it's somewhat tame overall. Fun to listen to though.

Bulletproof ( I wish I was) is a great example of where we are going in the Radiohead pantheon. It's suprisingly subtle, quiet and looming. The guitar parts are simple, but the sounds are beautiful and they completely make the song for me. It's not the best rock song on the album, but it is obviously the one that no one expected from them. It's almost a candidate for being the frontrunner for emo, but Coldplay is probably a better comparison.

Black star, for all of it's bland structure and boring lyrics has one of my favorite sing along verses from this album. The hook is really really good, and I love a good hook. The lyrics are delicate and intricate if a bit bland. The instrumentation is good, but nothing to write home about. It's just consistant.

Take that last paragraph and repeat it for Sulk. There is more ambient sounds and there are more interesting little touches, but it's just a good song.

(I know, another aside. I realize that I'm complaining a lot about "just good" songs, but it's dificult to seperate the good from the truly excellent with a band this good one comes to expect more.)

Street Spirit (Fade Out) however, is a truly excellent song it's a slowly developing, well constructed, quietly powerful song. The flourishes seem completely needed, and it just holds up really well. It's a fitting end to an album that played with both sides of a truly great band.

I've delved a lot into the individual songs in this album, and we talked about Creep, so let's step back and look at the big picture. Radiohead as an entity is at an interesting point. They have already had unimaginable success with a grunge influenced song that has become an instant classic. Their great contribution to music may very well be that song, and their second album shows glimpses of genius in two different directions.

Imagine if the band had gone down the other path. Radiohead writes another three or four albums of grunge inspired rock, trying to remain relevent in the oughts, but slowly being overtaken by young, nu-metal groups. Their more mature sound relegates them outside the polite company of radio and they slowly fade out of relevance.

This would have been a sad fate for them, and everyone would have listened to Creep and thought, "hey, whatever happened to these guys.

As it turned ot though, well, that's the next part of the Catalog Project: Radiohead.

That's what we call a cliffhanger, ladies and more feminine ladies. These are probably going to come once a month or two, but if you'd like them to come faster or slower, please leave a comment.

In other housekeeping news, we have almost reached 1000 hits on the site, and when we do, I'll add some stats to the next album project, so you can see where everyone else who reads tap is from, and we can figure ot together who is reading from the really weird ones. January, by the way, has been by far our most successful month ever, and I would like to thank you for that. Every time I check the blog and see the counter turned over, it warms my cold monster heart. Te next update will be next Saturday, same bat time, same bat channel. If you'd like, you can subscribe to the blog, spread the word, or even suggest an album. Also, and this would be crazy, if you wanted to write an album project, we can always use more insight.

For the future, I have a list of things I'd like to do, including an audio commentary of an album, a group chat about the album as an art form, and the Eppys or Albys for epic or interesting suggestions.

Okay, housekeeping over, go back to your lives or leave a comment or something, or tell me what you think about these albums.

"You like monkey?" "Sure, I like monkeys." "I hate monkey."
Matt