Radiohead -- Pablo Honey


6/10

"Inauspicious." Radiohead's debut album, Pablo Honey, borders on this classification. Radiohead, known for pushing borders just years later, began their career as a fairly generic mid-90's alt-rock band. I posited a theory three years ago that several nations have produced their own equivalent of a Radiohead. The Appleseed Cast in America (this is not a rogue opinion). Kent in Sweden. Kashmir in Denmark. All four pushed the rock music format into startling new territories, but not before kicking off their careers with non-noteworthy, yet enjoyable debuts. Radiohead's does feature a bona fide hit, though, in "Creep," a song from which the band have spent most of their career distancing themselves. "Creep" features a certain pop-chorus, belt-it-at-the-bar feeling none of the band's other songs inhabit, even on this album. However, "Creep" isn't the only departure from later Radiohead.
Through the entirety of Pablo Honey, vocalist, Thom Yorke, lyricises with more transparency than on any of the band's later work, singing nakedly about romantic relationships as his mates plug away at the aforementioned generic alt-rock sound. The music does begin to yield fruit as the album jangles along, particularly in its latter moments, with the emotive guitar of "Lurgee," and the extended psychedelic freak out of a closer, "Blow Out," a harbinger for the anxiety-laden atmosphere Radiohead would soon explore in full. While Pablo Honey might not blow anyone's mind, as debuts go, you could do a lot worse. Radiohead have nothing to be ashamed of here.
Radiohead - Blow Out [Pablo Honey] from faustidioteque on Vimeo.

1993 Parlophone/Capitol
1. You 3:29
2. Creep 3:56
3. How Do You? 2:12
4. Stop Whispering 5:26
5. Thinking About You 2:41
6. Anyone Can Play Guitar 3:38
7. Ripcord 3:10
8. Vegetable 3:13
9. Prove Yourself 2:25
10. I Can't 4:13
11. Lurgee 3:08
12. Blow Out 4:40

Comments

Neal (BFS) said…
I remember reading an article in Dublin (while visiting a record shop for U2 singles) that Radiohead was quite uncool to not play "Creep" in concert anymore. Some people feel the same about Led Zeppelin and "Stairway to Heaven." I'm not sure what to think on the subject. I can understand getting annoyed with playing a song because you get tired of it, but... there is also the fan factor. I kind of agree with Michael Stipe of REM in tempering your dislike of a song, because hating on something your fans love is a bit... self-defeating and biting of the hand that feeds you, no matter how famous you are.

I also listened to Pablo Honey for awhile when I was visiting that store, and was quite dismayed at how different it was from the following two albums, which I quite liked. It's amazing how much they shifted from there to The Bends and then OK Computer. I haven't listened to their current two latest, but I did like In Rainbows a lot. Took the crazed experimentation of the albums after OK Computer and made it more accessible. I liked parts of those albums, but they imploded things a little too much for my taste.
I saw them on the In Rainbows tour. I heard a rumor that they were pulling out "Creep" on a few dates--8 out the 66, so it was kind of like getting a "You Win A Free Sprite!" under a bottle cap for those who heard it on that tour. That was one of the best shows I've ever witnessed, but unfortunately, they didn't play "Creep." I'll talk about that show more when I get there, but I thought it was funny that the huge hipster crowd who attended side-eyed me when I said I wanted to hear "Creep," yet didn't know the words to any of the songs and stood stiller than a corpse (which at least goes through a slight decompositional jerk at points) throughout the band's kinetic performance. The hipsters were quite great, though, at using their parents' credit cards to buy the ridiculously-priced ($80!) tour shirt to prove to their similarly exsanguinous, yet non-attending brethren that they were at the show, which, while apparently an important thing that they were a part of, didn't move any of them to an extent that they resembled actual humans.
If you liked In Rainbows, I'm not 100% sure you'd like the last two. They almost seemed to pull back from engagement when they realized how much people connected with In Rainbows. I like both of the the albums, but without spoiling the reviews...they are different.
Neal (BFS) said…
Not sure where it's from, but there's an acoustic version of Creep that I like better than the original album version. Probably matches the lyrics a little better, that longing and sadness. Would have been awesome if you had heard it, but at least you saw them live. I think I've only seen them perform on SNL once, and that was a bit weird, since that was with Kid A or something with a lot of electronica and it's a bit harder to click with guys bobbing their heads and clicking on consoles. Not like you get a big feel for a performance on SNL usually, but I do remember that.

Funny about that crowd. Reminds me a bit of the Dessa concert we saw in Duluth. It was in an auditorium at a private college, so it had fixed seating that slopes toward the stage, and it did feel oddly formal. We weren't the only ones singing along or moving, but it was pretty restrained (though there was a big space in front of the stage that a couple kids were dancing in, and she crouched down and sang to them for a couple minutes and almost got them to come up on stage with her: it was a fun moment). They did an encore and she encouraged people to get up and crowd around the stage if we wanted, so a bunch of us did and were singing and dancing, and that felt A LOT more normal and in synch with how awesome the performance was (Aby Wolf was with her, and those to can harmonize better than almost anyone I've ever heard).

Later on, people were theorizing on Twitter that it was part of the college's monthly performance series, so there's a bunch of gray hairs that go to them and maybe that helped explain the oddness. Dessa was actually worried a bit about the crowd, hence the people talking about it with her, etc.

Ouch on the tour shirt. And I thought my U2 one from All That You Can't Leave Behind was bad. I don't recall exactly how high it was, but it wasn't nearly that much. I know you guys make money from t-shirt sales, but come on. You can't tell me they aren't quadrupling their money even at $40.

That comment about In Rainbows cracks me up. They do almost seem like they want to avoid being too accessible, the way their albums change so much. I was reading Yorke or another band member saying they're just influenced by lots of types of music and shift that way, but... they're way too good just to be following whims.

I wasn't big on Amnesiac (though I admittedly haven't listened to it much), but I did like Kid A and Hail to the Thief a lot. I think "There There" from Hail to the Thief is one of my favorite Radiohead songs. So I'll still want to see where they went with the two most recent, even if they are different.
Considering how heavily hip-hop influenced Dessa's music is, the fact that people were standing still at her show is maddening.
It seems like $35-$40 is the average for a decently well-known band. I've seen U2 twice in an eight year span, and paid $40 both times for a shirt. That Radiohead one was apparently made out of recycled tires or plastic bottles or some-such nonsense, which was the apparent explanation for the ridiculously high price. I could not bring myself to pay for one. Looks like they're going for even more now on EBay (>$90!). Crazy. Looking forward to your opinions on the rest of these albums.

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