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Packt Like Sardines in a Crushed Tin Box
Pyramid Song
Pull/Pulk Revolving Doors
You and Whose Army?
I Might Be Wrong
Knives Out
Amnesiac/Morning Bell
Dollars and Cents
Hunting Bears
Like Spinning Plates
Life in a Glass House |
Amnesiac
or
Limited Edition!
Released 06/04/2001 UK, 06/05/2001 US & Canada
Produced by Radiohead and Nigel Godrich.
Most of the tracks on Amnesiac were written and recorded during the Kid A sessions.
The band has always viewed their work from these sessions as two separate albums,
but steered away from releasing a double album. Colin Greenwood said in a recent interview,
"We had that group of songs to make one record, and the other ones are left over.
It's that we had, say, 23 songs and we wanted to have around 47 minutes of music,
so we chose the best combination out of that number (for 'Kid A'), and the rest are
waiting on the bench, waiting to be picked for the next team line-up. It is a combination
of like, more conventional, perhaps, but also more dissonant stuff. But it continues
on from 'Kid A'. It was all done in the same recording period. It is all a whole."
|
Notes:
When asked what Amnesiac will sound like in an interview before the album's release,
Thom replied, "If you look at the artwork for Kid A...well, that's like looking at
the fire from afar. Amnesiac is the sound of what it feels like to be standing IN
the fire." |
Amazon review
More song-driven and acoustic than Kid A, Radiohead's Amnesiac isn't quite "Kid B,"
but it is unquestionably cut from the same far-out cloth, as the band revels in fascinating
quirks and abject nihilism. It's also the first time in Radiohead's career that a
new record hasn't meant a complete shift in artistic priorities. Surely, however,
regardless of which was released first, they both deserve recognition; after all,
Amnesiac, like Kid A, is an amazing piece of work.
Only lightly augmented with electronics, songs like "You and Whose Army?" and "I Might
Be Wrong" almost sound like they came from a typical five-piece rock band. You may
even believe the band still employs a guitarist after hearing Jonny Greenwood's wistful
surf-guitar lead on "Knives Out" or his subtle but noticeable contributions to the
anticapitalist rant "Dollars and Cents." But inevitably, the band continually shifts
gears, moving into Boards of Canada territory on "Like Spinning Plates" and delivering
dark, bass-laden oddities like "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors," a fuzzed-out piece of
avant-garde techno that could just as easily be on an Autechre or Aphex Twin record.
The song's half-sung, half-spoken vocal was laid down by either a heavily distorted
Thom Yorke or, just perhaps, a loquacious microwave oven. Either way, the music always
has momentum, regardless of whether propelled by man or appliance. Radiohead as a
band understand how to make rock interesting again, and in the end, that's all they
set out to do when they recorded Amnesiac, as well as Kid A. It's more than can be
said for the bad frat-punk, teen-pop and soulless techno that currently rules the
charts, and for that alone, Radiohead's astonishing exploration of 21st-century anguish
deserves credit. |
