Radiohead – Amnesiac

The thing about Radiohead is that no matter which album you turn to, they’re all so incredibly rich and diverse. We could argue over which one is the best, over which one was truly their breakthrough one, and other super-pretentious subjects but I don’t think you could really say one is more diverse than the other. I remember falling in love with their ability at re-creating themselves with every new album and it’s still arguably, their strongest trait: musicianship. Listening to so much Björk has gotten me back into Radiohead and it’s found me really digging deep; it’s especially fun when you can dig back into the music you first fell in love with and find even more gems.

So I’m probably going really left-field with this choice but “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” is, in many ways, a microcosm of what Amnesiac is about. The album that really is Kid A Pt. 2 (they should’ve just made one massively superb album of 16 tracks of the best of each): it’s stunning, divisive and impeccable. I love how loud it is and after the shining melody on “Pyramid Song,” it’s a brisk change of pace. But still, it comes back to Thom Yorke’s haunting voice, singing about doors. As much as some like to hate, there is always a point to Radiohead’s lyrics and they’re all amazing. Here he sings about the doors opening in our lives but he warns, “There are doors that let you in and out but never open…but they are trapdoors…that you can’t come back from.” Then they end it all with a smashing amount of killer noise? Sweet.


And I remember getting a burned copy of this album as a gift the summer before my junior year and I wanted to immediately throw it away because I hated the girl that gave it to me. Plus, Kid A was the one that opened everything, so I wasn’t entirely stoked to hear something else just a year later. But I sucked on to the last two songs of the album like no others before it. “Like Spinning Plates” drive and outpour of reverb, atmospherics and those menacing keyboards was some kind of magic. Some kind of euphoria that exploded into your stream (“My body’s floating down the muddy river”) of consciousness and then, after an intense set of four minutes, you get the painstakingly gorgeousness of “Life in a Glasshouse.” I mean, are you serious? First of all, it starts with that open cymbal stomp and piano clank and it’s an evident style shift from the darkness of before - it’s jazzy, there’s clarinet, trumpet and trombone, and the dynamics are sublime. My descriptions are becoming worse and worse I fear but I completely get the gist of saying, “Well, of course I'd like to stay and chew the fat” but we must be honest at the same time, “Only, only, only…if someone is listening in.” – Bryan