Rank!
By
JBev
January 8th, 2010
When they arrived on the scene with “Creep”, they seemed destined for the one-hit wonder bins. But in the almost two decades since that auspicious debut, Radiohead has ascended to an untouchable status in the rock world, although calling their music “rock” doesn’t come close to covering the innovative and provocative boundary-pushing they’ve perfected. After taking on warhorses like the Beatles, the Stones, and Springsteen, JamsBio has chosen Radiohead as the first modern band to warrant a worst-to-first countdown of their music. Check back each day as our obsessive list-maker Jbev counts down all of the band’s album cuts and gives his reasons for the rankings, and also be prepared to tell him why he’s wrong in the comments section. It’s Everything In Its Right Place: The Ultimate Radiohead Countdown, exclusively on JamsBio.com.
81. “Treefingers”
From Kid A
LISTEN HERE
As we begin this list of the songs of Radiohead, we immediately run into the folly of such a project. After all, this is a band that pays strict attention to the thematic flow of their albums, which means a song like the ethereal instrumental “Treefingers” is stripped of much of its meaning when evaluated all by its lonesome.
…“Treefingers” lands this spot by default as much as anything else…it takes one for the team.
In its place as the fifth song on Kid A, which rivals OK Computer as the band’s most coherent and complete artistic statement when gobbled up in one listen, it serves as an ambient segue between the haunting wail of Thom Yorke on “How To Disappear Completely” and the crunching thunder of “Optimistic”. You can also view it as the line of demarcation between the first and second half of the album, a little palette-cleanser that gives your senses a rest before diving back into this heady world.
But this list is a celebration of the songs of Radiohead, and, as such, “Treefingers” has to fall to the bottom, because it fits the category of song rather loosely. Somewhere in there is an Ed O’Brien guitar piece that might have indeed been more concrete in its original form, but that was then subsequently and digitally re-imagined into the waves of sound that appear on the album.
The truth is that I don’t think our boys have it in them to write an aggressively bad song; their skill and diligence really don’t allow for such a thing to occur. So “Treefingers” lands this spot by default as much as anything else. On its own, well, as the cliché says, it is what it is. On Kid A, it takes one for the team.
80. “You”
From Pablo Honey
LISTEN HERE
The very first song on the very first Radiohead album, “You” finds many of the elements that would define the band already in place. Chief among those is the inspired guitar interplay, from the opening arpeggio that, in classic band fashion, seems to have just one note out of place to cause a hint of unsettlement, to the squall and drone lurking in the background of the verses, to the power-slam explosion in the refrains.
Alas, it all comes in the service of a song that dips too far into the well of grunge, the music in fashion at the time that had a limited number of inspired practitioners along with a ton of wannabes that drove the whole dynamic of quiet-to-loud music and soul-blaringly blunt lyrics into the ground. Radiohead, to their credit, saw that this type of song wasn’t in their wheelhouse pretty early in the game, and most grunge signifiers were absent by the time they released their next album.
But “You” fits the flannel-rock template pretty snugly, and it fails to compensate with the kind of tune that exemplified the best of the genre. You’re left with a song that exerts a lot of force to little avail.
79. “The Gloaming”
From Hail to the Thief
LISTEN HERE
In case you’re wondering, “gloaming” is a 10-cent word for the last gasps of twilight before night falls. Parsing Thom Yorke’s lyrics, it’s clear he means the term as a warning that bad times are nigh. As he sings, “Your alarm bells, your alarm bells/They should be ringing.”
It sounds like a distant plea for help, when a more clarion call might have been far more affecting.
It’s a chilling message, but the music, an exercise in tape-loopery, creates a hypnotic wash that dilutes some of Yorke’s urgency and harrowing imagery. Anybody who subscribes to the knee-jerk assessment of Hail to the Thief as a return by the band to more straightforward guitar rock will likely be surprised by what they find in this one.
If you could separate the words from the music here, I think that they’d both work just fine on their own. But taken together, “The Gloaming” doesn’t quite connect. It sounds like a distant plea for help, when a more clarion call might have been far more affecting.
78. “Prove Yourself”
From Pablo Honey
LISTEN HERE
There will be times early on in this list when it seems like I’m picking on Pablo Honey. In truth, I think it gets unfairly labeled sometimes as “Creep” and 11 bits of filler. But I also can’t deny that the leap in quality from Pablo Honey to The Bends was nothing short of stratospheric, and that the quality level of the music the band has released since has stayed on that dizzyingly high plateau. That means that the first album is always going to lag by comparison.
The tune in the verses is actually quite fetching, and the song would have done well to build off that rather than jump into the plodding chorus.
“Prove Yourself” is by no means a train wreck. The tune in the verses is actually quite fetching, and the song would have done well to build off that rather than jump into the plodding chorus. The guitar dynamics are fine as well, even if they dwarf Yorke a bit in the mix.
The production, as a whole, is a bit lacking, with the guitar blow-up after the soft opening sounding over-compensatory. Little of the ambition that would come to characterize the band is evident here either. Yorke would eventually abandon the song on the seemingly never-ending tour in support of the album, allegedly because he was unsettled by crowds singing along to the “I’m better off dead” refrain. Truth be told, I doubt that it’s missed that much these days.
77. “Hunting Bears”
From Amnesiac
LISTEN HERE
As a guest reviewer for this song, I’d like to enlist my cat Tyra. As I played “Hunting Bears” in preparation for this review, she popped up her head out of a sound sleep on my bed and shot a look at the stereo with her ears pinned back. Now I see the reason for including this instrumental on Amnesiac: Hidden feline messages. How diabolical!
This is another one that suffers when removed from its place in the album…
I suppose I can’t prove that claim, and Tyra wouldn’t actually corroborate, so I guess you, the reader, are left with my own take on this song. That’s actually Thom Yorke noodling around on the reverb-heavy guitar, creating this space-filler that sets up the head-tripping “Like Spinning Plates” on the album. It does a nice job creating a mood if not wowing us with technical mastery of the instrument.
This is another one that suffers when removed from its place in the album, and it’s so brief that it’s hard to get too revved up about it. Tyra may have other ideas though, which I’ll be able to confirm if she claws me to death in my sleep. Stay tuned.
76. “Go To Sleep”
From Hail to the Thief
LISTEN HERE
You get the sense from the downbeat nature of this song that when Thom Yorke punctuates each line with the refrain “Over my dead body,” he means it less as a defiant stand and more as an unstoppable eventuality. It’s also one of the few songs in which his concerns about the forces walling up all around us come off as more paranoid than pointed.
It’s…one of the few songs in which his concerns about the forces walling up all around us come off as more paranoid than pointed.
I think that this song comes off the rails a bit once the band veers away from the wounded folk of the first few bars and adds a herky-jerky time signature and some squealing guitars. It puts the entire song at a distance that’s at odds with the desperation of the narrative.
There are a few moments when this Hail to the Thief number gels, specifically Yorke’s hauntingly helpless benediction at the end: “May pretty horses come to you as you sleep/I’m gonna go to sleep/And let this wash all over me.” Still, despite all of the quirkiness the band tries to imbue, “Go To Sleep” remains one of their least memorable songs.
75. “Kid A”
From Kid A
LISTEN HERE
I’ve heard many rumors pertaining to the genesis of the album name Kid A, but one that I remember reading around the time of the album’s release always stuck with me. This particular rumor posited that Kid A was the name of a computer program that could accurately create the voice of a child. Whether or not that’s even close to true, I’ve always though that it was a good symbol of the band’s ambivalent attitude toward technology, because when you think about it, such a program is equal parts awe-inspiring and horrifying.
…Thom Yorke’s voice is distorted and stretched by technology beyond all recognition, to the point where it becomes devoid of every shred of humanity.
The song “Kid A” is sort of the dark inverse of that proposition, as Thom Yorke’s voice is distorted and stretched by technology beyond all recognition, to the point where it becomes devoid of every shred of humanity. It also makes the chilling lyrics (non-sequiturs about things lurking in the shadows and the singer in a pied piper role) darn near unintelligible.
That squashed voice is the most memorable thing about the song. After what sounds like a spaceship landing to start, the rest is just some computer twitching and Jonny Greenwood’s omnipresent Ondes Martenot, an instrument resembling a theremin on which the band for their more outré sound explorations has leaned heavily since Kid A. Phil Selway’s kicky drum beat seems almost out of place, but then again, disjointedness seems to be the feeling the song wants to convey. That it does, almost too well for it to be anything more than a dark curiosity.
74. “Vegetable”
From Pablo Honey
LISTEN HERE
The one thing that you can say in the defense of many of the lesser earlier songs of Radiohead is that they always had an innate sense of drama. They were always building to something, the kind of tension and release that the band may have thought at the time was the sole property of their idols, the Pixies, but was actually a hallmark of great rock songwriting since the time the music was born.
It should tell you something about the band’s catalog that a song with so much going for it is this far down the list.
“Vegetable” contains some overwrought lyrics, no doubt (“Your words surround me and I asphyxiate/And I burn all hate” being the most egregious example), but all is forgiven during the swooning chorus, when Yorke wails “I will not control myself” after the crunching guitars clear a path.
The great thing about the band is that they’ve always sustained this ability that can’t be taught, even as they began to disdain what they considered to be the more mundane aspects of rock song structure, a la melody or verses and choruses. Thus you can trace the line from a somewhat pedestrian song like this to later triumphs like “Like Spinning Plates” or “The National Anthem,” which, on the surface, seem worlds away.
One other element of this song that bears mentioning is Jonny Greenwood’s serrated solo toward the end. For a guy as brilliant as he is on the instrument, he rarely steps into a clichéd spotlight solo role; even here, he is eventually enveloped by the rest of the guitars. But the varied textures and colors he fits into the brief space he’s allotted to work is practically Hendrixian. So “Vegetable” has that as well. It should tell you something about the band’s catalog that a song with so much going for it is this far down the list.
73. “Sit Down. Stand Up”
From Hail to the Thief
LISTEN HERE
I’ve always felt that Hail to the Thief gets underrated somewhat, suffering because it didn’t have the media hook of the albums that sandwiched it (the “destroy rock” shock value of Kid A and Amnesiac and the revolutionary method of distribution for In Rainbows). There are, however, two criticisms about the album that are fair, in my opinion: The album teeters a bit between straightforward rock and computer experimentation, thus depriving it of some consistency, and that it was maybe a song or three too long.
Complex? Yes. Impressive? Certainly. Approachable? Maybe not so much.
“Sit Down. Stand Up.” falls under the blanket of both of those criticisms. Although I judged it on its own for the sake of this list, I must mention that I’ve always felt it was an uneasy fit on the album following the incendiary opener “2-2=5.” And while it has its worthwhile moments, I also don’t think it quite hangs with the rest of the album quality-wise.
The Rwandan genocide apparently inspired the sparse lyrics, and you can glean that from the chilling line “We can wipe you out anytime.” Yorke’s vocal is up front in the mix, with an itchy computer beat and a muffled riff (can’t even tell if it’s a guitar or keyboard) in the background. The music rises subtly before finally busting out into a techno freakout, with Yorke intoning the words “the raindrops” some 47 times.
I know that no description could ever do music justice, but just reading that last paragraph back to myself, I can see again how this track could be a hard sell. Complex? Yes. Impressive? Certainly. Approachable? Maybe not so much.
72. “Morning Bell/Amnesiac”
From Amnesiac
LISTEN HERE
We’ll save the discussion of this song’s overall merits for when it comes up later on in the countdown in its original version, found on Kid A. The band resurrected the song for Amnesiac, with the same melody but a completely different musical arrangement.
When Yorke sings “release me” here, it’s as if he’s trapped by the circus-like music surrounding him.
This version goes for a kind of fractured fairy-tale vibe, which, though it has a seductively spooky quality, sort of changes the whole meaning of the lyrics along the way, and I’m not sure for the better. The original version’s slinky, stuttering rhythm was a nice match for the domestic disorientation of the lyrics. On “Morning Bell/Amnesiac,” that disorientation turns to downright horror, but the subtlety is gone.
Musically, this version reminds me of “Blue Jay Way” by the Beatles, when George Harrison’s voice seemed buffeted by all the distorted sound effects fluttering about. When Yorke sings “release me” here, it’s as if he’s trapped by the circus-like music surrounding him. Yet that claustrophobic effect also translates to the listener. The open spaces of the original allow us to fill in the blanks ourselves, which, in many ways, is much scarier.
71. “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”
From In Rainbows
LISTEN HERE
“Arpeggi” as in arpeggio, those circular guitar figures that dominate this In Rainbows track. Jonny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien certainly get a finger workout here, as their byplay propels the early parts of this song. In typical Radiohead fashion though, the track shapeshifts toward the end, allowing some spotlight to the bass of Colin Greenwood. Phil Selway typically keeps everyone in line with rock-steady yet inventive work on the drums.
“Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” with all of its aquatic references, seems to me to be one big metaphor for losing yourself in the tides and eddies of a relationship.
There is no questioning the instrumental virtuosity on display here. However, that doesn’t quite translate into a killer track. At times this almost seems like an instrumental for which lyrics were added as an afterthought. The words get in the way here somehow.
Not that there’s anything wrong with the lyrics, particularly. One of the most endearing things about In Rainbows for me was Thom Yorke’s willingness to write about love and to do so in a positive way. “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” with all of its aquatic references, seems to me to be one big metaphor for losing yourself in the tides and eddies of a relationship. You need a willingness to abandon control, even if it means, as the song implies, falling off the edge of the earth. In a revelatory passage, Yorke sings, “Everybody leaves/If they get the chance/And this is my chance.”
Pretty good stuff. But the song isn’t quite the sum of its parts, even with the individual parts as strong as they are. That alchemy the band conjures on their best material is missing here, but it’s still an affecting near-miss.
