Review Summary: Organized./.Un
REPETITION
Fill a bag with too much and it will overflow. In this case
Kid A was the bag and
Amnesiac was the overflow.
Amnesiac contained songs that were recorded during the
Kid A sessions but were held off for another album after it. Like
Kid A,
Amnesiac takes numerous steps in Electronica and Post-Rock, but also leaves room for bouts of Alt-Rock from their days during
The Bends.
Being a combination of their early days before
OK Computer and their days after
OK Computer,
Amnesiac contains a mixture of elements from both eras in Radiohead's discography. For instance,
Dollars & Cents is an eclectic mixture of guitar rhythms and percussion echoes along with some cryptic singing from Thom Yorke.
Hunting Bears is straight out of the
Pablo Honey days, but is surprisingly more distant in the rhythm of the guitar and slower on the uptake near the end.
Pyramid Song is by far the standout track of the entire album, featuring Jonny Greenwood utilizing the ondes Martenot to the fullest of its ability, and Thom Yorke's vocals being given a psychedelic wobble to them.
Like Spinning Plates defies reason, carving out it's own little reality. Yorke had sang the vocals backwards, only to reverse that to get backwards sounding vocals in a straight lyric readout. Despite it being a fairly creative and exciting idea, the track itself is far too dull. The vocals aren't given enough clarity and it becomes too clear that they are reversed, which can be annoying when trying to comprehend the lyrics.
Knives Out just completely drops the ball. Instead of following the coherent path of the entire album, this song does a complete 180 halfway through the album and busts out a more mainstream tune reminiscent of their
OK Computer guitar-string days. Despite that not being too much of a bad thing on its own, the track is out of its element in this album, and disrupts the entire flow that five songs worked so hard building.
You And Whose Army muffles the vocals to create the atmosphere of old 1940's "doowop" songs. The only problem being that muffling the rest of the instruments and not just the vocals would have benefited the track much more and boosted the atmosphere. By far an S-Class track should be given to
Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors, as Radiohead remove the erase heads on their tape recorders and create a repeating melody that haunts my senses endlessly, and benefits the album's almost surreal, yet grounded, atmosphere.
Kid A completely revolutionized the way we heard Radiohead's music, whereas
Amnesiac simply trudged along like the little brother who doesn't quite know his way around the neighborhood yet. There were multiple standout tracks, but there were too many bad ones, not to mention the hilariously clashing
Knives Out. It began to seem like Radiohead had taken two steps forward, and then one step back.
