Amnesiac

Amnesiac-Radiohead

Realeased: June 2001

Parlophone, Capitol

Hmmmm... Amnesiac was released the same year as Kid A, and is widely believed to be not quite as good.  Well, that may be so.  I still like it.  I just got done reading one reviewer's opinion that this album lacked cohesion.  In the strictest sense, he's right.  The songs do rather jump from one style to another without making a lot of sense.  However, I hear this record as the soundtrack to some sci-fi flick that takes place post nuclear holocaust in a vast wasteland that was earth.  I can see this movie running through my head as the tracks move from one to the other.  And, despite Yorke's reassurance, in "Pyramid Song", that "There is nothing to fear, nothing at all", I don't believe him.  In the world that these songs conjure up in my brain, there is a lot to fear.  Robots are making slaves of the leftover humanoids and there ain't no hope for humanity.  Run, if you can... 

Radiohead has made better albums than this one, true, and if this is as bad as it gets, well, we should all be so lucky.  It doesn't really sound like their previous albums; I think that they were experimenting on this one.  Trying out new toys and ways of producing sound.  My favorite tune is "Life in a Glass House", with it's 1920's speakeasy jazz trombones.  The clarinet and horns talking to one another...  It's the end of the night and everyone's tight on moonshine and whiskey.  Smoke so thick you can't see who you're dancing with--hell, you can barely stand up anyway.  But it's still in the futuristic movie.  See?  I don't have a lot of sci-fi, as a genre, experience, but I LOVE it when there's an element of the past in futuristic movies.  And I mean decades in the past.  Like Blade Runner is a 1940's film noir and Cowboy Bepop is the 60's version of the wild, wild west.  So, in the movie that is this album, the humans go to speakeasies and the women wear kohl black eyeliner, and it's smeared and they're tired.  O, so tired.