Amnesiac

From this end of the Radiohead telescope, all the hullabaloo about last year’s Kid-A was, quite frankly, unbelievable.

You’d have sworn the Mummy-I want-my-choruses-and-traditional-song-structures-back brigade had never heard a guitarless record in their lives. Of all the reviews, think pieces and after-the-match analysis, only Rolling Stone’s David Fricke and Simon Reynolds in Uncut refrained from talking complete reactionary bollocks, accurately placing the record in a post-rock-opera context.

Otherwise, the record was as unfairly derided as OK Computer was over-feted: why do so many ‘adult’ rock hacks still talk a pre-pubescent lingo of superlatives and absolutes, especially when a band like Radiohead deal in subtle shadings and precise calibrations? Anyone who heard Thom Yorke as the man from UNKLE or the Airbag/How Am I Driving extended EP will have no trouble connecting ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ to something like ‘Pyramid Song’ off this new record, essentially Kid A’s twin, retained in utero for a term while its brother’s bruises healed.

So, Amnesiac. Nice word. A very Radiohead word, suggesting someone who can’t remember to forget, who can’t get no relief from the polterzeitgeist. Yorke still sounds like a guy with a bad case of the Worried Man blues. His lyrical wit, such as it is, comes in oblique snippets: “I’m a reasonable man/Get off my case” (‘Packed Like Sardines In A Crushed Tin Box’).

Here are musicians who make noise out of neurosis – bits of blue funk, chopped up blues and krautrock rigor mortis (‘I Might Be Wrong’), often deliberately playing against their strengths, suppressing Thom’s ear for melody and Jonny’s devious guitar lines.

But let’s bury those niggling prog-rock jibes. Sure, since 1995 the band have been trying out a vocabulary of time signatures that don’t always trip so easily off the tongue (here, ‘You And Whose Army’ or ‘Pyramid Song’ could be Robert Wyatt fronting early Roxy Music) but they never regress into cold fusion. Their jazz sensibility comes via the warm but weird soundgardens of Miles, Mingus and Alice Coltrane, translated into electronica esoterica by way of Scott Walker, Brian Eno and DJ Shadow.

Songs like ‘Dollars & Cents’ and ‘Knives Out’ still hit you in the heart; it’s just that they first take a detour around the nervous system. Radiohead circa 2000/1 are preoccupied with how much detail you can squeeze onto digital audio tape: during ‘Morning Bell/Amnesiac’, the listener can easily understand how Neil Jordan kept hearing the band’s twilight atmospheres while making In Dreams, yet couldn’t use them for fear of dominating the visuals.

I’m not the first to hypothesise that this Kid A/Amnesiac axis will probably come to be regarded as the band’s blue Berlin period, a sort of Trans/Reactor aberration. Already, there are murmurs of Radiohead returning to a more direct aesthetic, covering Neil’s ‘Cinnamon Girl’ and so forth. For sure, the closing ‘Life In A Glasshouse’, with clarinets and trombone charts that sound like they’ve been drawn by Gerald Scarfe, is the kind of New Orleans funeral dirge that precedes a long night of waking-the-dead revelry. But happy days? Only if written by Beckett.