The aural wallpaper to emptiness

HAIL TO THE CREEPS

A Radiohead album is the musical equivalent of Existential literature. Wait… That’s a pompous and pretentious way of putting it. Besides, this statement is unfair, considering that a Radiohead album (say, "OK Computer") and an Existentialist novel (say, Albert Camus’ The Stranger) should be appraised in its own terms. Radiohead opuses are best heard in one’s own room with monolithic speakers while pain, menace, isolation and the Apocalypse are huffing and puffing away to tear the bedroom door down and enter. Books by Camus, Jean Paul Sartre and Soren Kierkegaard are best read in one’s own room with bright fluorescent bulbs while joy, optimism, the Rapture, and all the domestic hallelujahs are huffing and puffing away to tear the bedroom down and get the hell out. We read Existential novels to be miserable. We listen to Radiohead songs because we already are miserable. Or is it the other way around?

Yes, one can’t avoid waxing philosophical when talking about Radiohead. The band, just like Pink Floyd before them, has created music and lyrics that delve into man’s postmodern malaise. (A rarity in this day and age of lackluster music, you-guys-rock lyrics, corporate divas, stupid, stupid controversies where a band like Creed gets sued for not being shitty Creed enough. Art is dead. Advertising is king. And we are exhausted. Special thanks to whom it may concern – God, the devil or the sad blue machine that determines our fate – for Radiohead.)

But Thom Yorke and company as the chroniclers of personal abysses wasn’t always the case.

A Concise History Of Radiohead filched From The Internet – And Then Some

Radiohead made its smashing debut over the airwaves with Creep in ’93. Observers of the band say the self-loather’s anthem – very grungy, very MTV Alternative Nation, very irritating considering the radio and music television omnipresence it was accorded – almost became the one-hit albatross that did Radiohead in. The album, "Pablo Honey," came across as a schizophrenic bag of sonic goodies – equal parts good tunes (Anyone Can Play Guitar, Stop Whispering, Thinking About You) and forgettable ditties (Lurgee, Ripcord, and Vegetable). (Creep falls under both.) But two years later, Radiohead pulled an extraterrestrial creature instead of the predicted rabbit out of its musical hat with "The Bends." The follow-up platter is spacey-and-atmospheric (musically), cryptic-and-compelling (lyrically), and exceptional (overall). Vocalist and lyricist Thom Yorke’s shtick was disease and despair, fakery and falsity, as well as claustrophobia and Prozac painkillers – not the hackneyed topics explored by throwaway bands lording it over the musical landscape. F*ck Bush and Silverchair.

Dig the lyrics of songs like Fake Plastic Trees, Bones, Nice Dream ("I called my friend, the good angel/But she’s out with her ansaphone/She says she would love to come help/But the sea would electrocute us all… Nice dream") and My Iron Lung ("We scratch our eternal itch/A twentieth century bitch/And we are grateful for our iron lung"). Despite the bleakness, the album ends with the optimistic line recalling the Beatles: "Immerse your soul in love."

Filled with sinister keyboards, eerie drum loops and transcendent guitars, "OK Computer," the follow-up to "The Bends," can be considered Radiohead’s hybrid of Pink Floyd, Miles Davis, Jeff Buckley, Franz Kafka and Alice in Wonderland.

Hey, "OK Computer" is as dense, bombastic and brilliant as – others will call me a blasphemer for this – Pink Floyd’s "The Dark Side of the Moon" and Miles Davis’ "In A Silent Way." Here, Thom Yorke sings about pigs on antibiotics, subterranean homesick aliens, girls with Hitler hairdos, unborn chicken voices in one’s head and other absurd concepts and creatures. As a whole, "OK Computer" is one man’s long, hard stare into a surreal and dystopian world. (That’s all for now, lest this article start sounding like some snobbish, pedantic cock-and-bull some music writers have been known to churn out. This is not school. This is not a slice of one’s overpriced education. It’s just rock n’ roll, anyway.)

"Kid A" (2000) and "Amnesiac" (2001) are the misunderstood twins – inaccessible, non-linearly arranged, elliptically worded, yet not less compelling albums. Few really got them. Those who claim to have fully understood these records are either heavily into Aphex Twin or lying through their teeth.

As for me, I’m still peering through the disorienting thickets of electronic sounds, jarring aural pastiches and lyrics about how "big fish eat the little ones" and how it is to be "packt like sardines in a crushed tin box" in those two albums, hoping to catch an epiphany or two. If "Kid A" and "Kid B" are easily misunderstood detours for the band (where Radiohead is headed, nobody can tell), "Hail to the Thief" can be considered the logical follow up to "OK Computer." "Hail" is more tuneful and accessible than its two predecessors, which a re more brooding and foreboding with their dark electronic hearts.

People will get it this time, if they would only listen and spread the creamy white legs of their minds.

METAPHYSICAL GRAFFITI

This is a tactical retreat for Radiohead. Rather than pushing through with the electronic alchemy germinated by "Kid A" and "Amnesiac," the band opted to return to melodic, guitar-dominated rock music. Thom Yorke and company decided to be a rock band again – albeit making use of stock electronic bleeps and ambient whizzes. The lyrics are vintage Radiohead, though: bleak, fractured, metaphorical, and ambiguous like an uplifting suicide letter. It is Thom Yorke’s meditations on absurd military skirmishes and life after 9/11.

2+2=5 (or The Lukewarm) was inspired by Nineteen Eighty-Four’s stilted, doublethink mathematics where "two & two always makes up five." It is all about power and domination. (And whoever holds power has the monopoly on truth – but that is Michel Foucalt’s philosophy, and I promised you readers I would not make this review sound like f*cking school.) In the case of 2+2=5 (same with the next track, Sit Down. Stand Up.), the speaker is the authoritarian figure and not the oppressed, existential individual. "Sit down… Stand up… Walk into the jaws of hell," sings Yorke. "We can wipe you out… Anytime." Like George W. Bush fierily addressing the "enemies of peace." Such irony.

Sail to the Moon (or Brush the Cobwebs Out of the Sky) starts with a melancholy piano. This song would be at home in "The Bends." It is that lilting. Go to Sleep (or Little Man Being Erased) is one of my favorite tracks. It has been a long time since the band’s resident guitar wizard Johnny Greenwood came up with jangly and really catchy guitars.

Where I End and You Begin (or The Sky is Falling in) recalls Paranoid Android. Those sobbing strings layered with Yorke’s "I will eat you alive" line will make listeners marvel at the creativity tugging at those strings.

The percussive There There (or The Boney King of Nowhere), the first single, is another compelling track. Here, Yorke sagely sings, "Just because you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there." In I Will, the singer is fearful of the apocalyptic fate that awaits his children.

The highlights of the album are A Punchup at a Wedding, Myxomatosis, and A Wolf at the Door. I just love the infectious groove and the way Thom sneers and scorns against a "Hypocrite opportunist/Don’t infect me with your poison/A bully in a china shop" in Punchup. On the other hand, weird riff shape and lurching time signature characterize the following track about a mongrel cat. "A Wolf at the Door," with its stream-of-consciousness lyrics, is the most enigmatic of them all. "I keep the wolf from the door but he calls me up on the phone tells me all the ways that he’s gonna mess me up," sputters Yorke.

Yes, no matter how tuneful and melodic (or, in certain stretches, optimistic) this record comes across, there is always, always that malevolent wolf on the door trying to huff and puff its way, break down the door, and mess us up real bad. The wolf may be pain, menace, despair, anguish or isolation, whatever. Go pick your own demon.

It doesn’t matter, since two and two always makes up five, anyway.

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For comments, suggestions, curses and invocations, e-mail iganja@hotmail.com.