Well. It’s a given I’ll buy this album. It’s the sort of disc I feel I have to listen to multiple times, to get comfortable with. My initial thought is this album sounds like Rubber Soul if the Beatles got to go back and rerecord it knowing everything they learned from Revolver through The White Album.

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Needless to say I’m a fair Radiohead fan. They recently announced their new album In Rainbows will be for sale via their website for a price determined by you. It’s been quite some time since their last album Hail To The Thief, so there’s a ton of pent-up demand.

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Mr. Tunequest found a little bit of new Radiohead stuff. They’re supposed to release a new album sometime this year. Really hard to make any kind of evaluation with these really short, random snippets, but I’ll certainly get it as soon as it’s released.

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After listening to all the Radiohead albums repeatedly over the past few months, these are the songs I marked with a five star rating in iTunes. The order below is chronological, not from best to worst.

If forced to pick a Top Five, it would be Paranoid Android, Karma Police, Pyramid Song, High And Dry, and Everything In Its Right Place.

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I’m finally done with my Radiohead listening project and can come up a list of their albums from “best to worst” - in my humble opinion, of course.

This actually answered a burning question I had which was how The Bends stacks up to Kid A, Amnesiac, and Hail To The Thief. To my surprise, The Bends fared better than any of those three according to my totally nonobjective Intra-Album Ranking System.

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If Pablo Honey were by any artist other than Radiohead, I don’t think I would own it. The only notable song is the outstanding Creep. Otherwise, there are a few hit single-ish tunes that remind me of the Gin Blossoms, while the rest are shapeless muddles.

Two particular songs seem to inform the band’s later work: You and Creep. Both contain some interesting lead guitar work with splashes of atonality, and Thom’s expressive vocals, ranging between neurotic warbling and a full out holler. Both exist in embryonic form on Pablo Honey and are expanded upon to much better effect on The Bends and subsequent albums.

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Near impossible to follow up OK Computer with another masterpiece, Radiohead took a bold leap into the unknown. Kid A’s roots are in OK Computer, namely the computerized vocals, spacey feel, and down-tempo minor chord centered songs, but certainly an experimental, electronic vibe wins out.

After OK Computer Radiohead contemplated several options, among them a return to three minute pop songs, or abandoning chords and melody altogether. It seems they settled on changing more or less everything. Band members played different instruments, Thom’s voice was processed into an instrument in and of itself, guitars are almost nonexistent, and lyrics were reduced to pulling phrases out of a hat. The resulting album was widely anticipated and sold well on its debut, although both fans and critics alike were polarized.

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Amnesiac arrived eight months after Kid A and sprang from the same sessions. It’s hard not to consider these songs as “Kid B”. In addition, these songs are pretty much studio based, and possibly a deliberate attempt to be strange and vague in order to free Radiohead from the expectations regarding their more commercial work.

This album has a few songs I really love (namely the first two), but it’s dragged down by material that I feel is weaker than that Kid A or Hail To The Thief. I can appreciate the artistic effort, but that doesn’t always translate into entertaining listening.

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Radiohead’s sixth and most recent album (dating from 2003, which shows how much time ha passed since anything new) returns to guitar based roots after the electronic experimentation of Kid A and Amnesiac, but doesn’t go back far enough to recall The Bends. While it combines aspects across their previous work, in my opinion, those choices aren’t necessarily the best, and as such Hail To The Thief is disappointingly hit and miss.

Overall, the songs are slightly over-long without enough contrast between them or their sections. Even after repeated listening, I find many indistinguishable. I recall a musical moment and can’t place if it came from Kid A, Amnesiac, or Hail To The Thief.

Still, when Radiohead hits, they hit large, and my favorite tracks bear repeated listening, namely 2+2=5, Myxomatosis, and Scatterbrained.

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The Bends is Radiohead’s second album, and sounds it - an evolutionary step squarely between the melodic rock of Pablo Honey and the moody, otherworldly masterpiece OK Computer. There’s conflict between standard rock and more experimental, nearly atonal sonic textures. Some songs are frustratingly safe, others gloriously so, and a few flirt with the cutting edge. In retrospect, Radiohead was on the edge of a creative leap, peeking into a canyon but not quite over the rift.

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