Radiohead -- Amnesiac

10/10

For me, Kid A and Amnesiac exist in the same musical world. Kid A is blurry, and Amnesiac is a vision of that world come into focus. It's like an optometrist putting a new lens in front of a patient's eyes, and asking, "How does it look now?" Kid A is largely icy electronics, ghostly, alienating vocals, and only a bit of organic instrumentation. The world it paints, to me at least, is one of a post-apocalyptic, post-Western Civilization landscape, bathed in strange, cold light; artifacts of the world-that-was only curiosities for whoever is left. Jagged lines reveal themselves to be skeletal trees, fuzzy distance to be the background of a 1930's cartoon. Amnesiac puts that world into focus with more organic instrumentation--i.e. a lot more electric guitar and real drums, even strings--but it doesn't abandon the heavy lean on electronics. When the organic instruments arrive, they sound warmer. For instance, horns appear on one Kid A song and one Amnesiac song--the horns on Kid A sound like they are played by malfunctioning robots, butAmnesiac's feel human, even if they are ancient and ghostly. More than anything, though, more than my nebulous blurry vs. in-focus description is this simple fact: Kid A is tense, and Amnesiac is relaxed. Even though there is certainly tension within these songs, there is a certain airy freedom, a sense of space and unpredictability throughout Amnesiac. This becomes especially clear in its raucous, jazz funeral ending--that while this might be serious, incredible music, it is still incredibly fun. This is why, while I love Kid A dearly, I will give a possibly unpopular opinion: Amnesiac is my favorite Radiohead album.
 I'll close this review, which frankly, as I've said all I need to say, doesn't need to be any longer than this, with a quote from Evan Pricco's 2010 Juxtapoz interview of Radiohead's longtime artistic collaborator, Stanley Donwood:

How come you don’t live in London?
Because there you can’t get out. You can’t see the countryside. It’s too flat. I grew up in Essex County and it was very flat, and very close to London. Funny enough, though, London is my favorite city in the world. In a fucked up way, though.
I’m really into the history of a place, and the first thing I do when I’m in a place like San Francisco is say, “How did all this stuff get here, and what was here before?” And a lot of American history has been erased, a lot of the Native American culture and history destroyed. But in London you get a full history of things. People have been writing about it for 1,000 years. When I wander through London, I feel like I’m drifting through the autumn leaves of the past.
London is probably dying as a city, it probably won’t last another 100 years in terms of economic and political influence. The influence is waning. So I walk through this faded city, and everywhere I go, every name of a street means something, there is a story. And you can picture very clearly how everything in London looked 100 years ago, 200, 500… its all there. It’s all written about. That is why I love London.
And that is what all the artwork I did for the Radiohead album Amnesiac is all about: London as an imaginary prison, a place where you can walk around and you are the Minotaur of London, we are all the monsters, we are all half human half beast. We are trapped in this maze of this past.

So Amnesiac was a London album?
For me it was. The work I did on Amnesiac was done by me taking the train to London, getting lost and taking notes.

And that was sort of what the album was about, wasn’t it? Like finding all these historical documents in someone’s attic from a hundred years ago. Nothing sounds like it goes together, but there is this voice that links it all together, verifying that its from the same culture. That’s an amazingly underrated album.
We wanted it to be a like a book. And someone made these pages in a book and it went into drawer in a desk and was forgotten about in the attic. And the attic was then forgotten. And visually and musically the album is about finding the book and opening the pages. And that is why I wanted to make that physical book with the album that we did.



2001 Parlophone/Capitol
1. Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box 4:00
2. Pyramid Song 4:49
3. Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors ([note 1]) 4:07
4. You and Whose Army? 3:11
5. I Might Be Wrong 4:54
6. Knives Out 4:15
7. Morning Bell/Amnesiac 3:14
8. Dollars and Cents 4:52
9. Hunting Bears 2:01
10. Like Spinning Plates 3:57
11. Life in a Glasshouse 4:34