The Bends (1995)

I don’t listen to Radiohead much but lately I’ve been trying again. I keep hoping it will finally click for me with this exceedingly important rock band to Gen X, compared generationally to David Bowie, Pink Floyd, and Talking Heads. See also the lengthy artist bio by Stephen Thomas Erlewine at Amazon Music. I’m skipping their first album, Pablo Honey, which I didn’t even try for years. My secret superpower happens to be an ability to avoid “Creep,” on which I recall a lot of moaning and groaning about overplay. I never heard it properly until 1997. I’m fond of the Prince cover, I will say (and I thought the way it was used in the 2024 movie Heretic was quite interesting). In the late ‘90s a Gen X friend pulled me aside to clue me to The Bends being the better album over OK Computer. Wow, OK. It motivated me to listen more and, for a time, I thought I could almost hear it. But this is my pattern with Radiohead. The appeal is elusive, out of the corner of my eye if I can see it at all. On recent visits to their albums it has been about the same. My notes on The Bends mention two songs: “High and Dry,” which has an epic guitar solo and a chorus I whistle with. If I’m understanding my streaming service app interface correctly, it might be the most popular song on the album. The other song that caught me was “(Nice Dream),” a nice song but who parenthesizes whole titles? Well, Radiohead, that’s who—brash iconoclasts, experimentalists par excellence, enigmatic rock stars, etc., etc. Their sloppy mode often reminds me of Pavement, who also have never done much for me. At one point I even pondered the emo question because that’s what Radiohead often sounds like to me. I found on the internet that there is a long-running and intense debate about that point. The consensus is they’re not emo. I’m leaving it alone. Like my Gen X friend in 1999 was implying, maybe the greatness of Radiohead needs no explanation, it’s so obvious. Just, perhaps, some gentle re-ranking about which are the better albums. I might try my hand at that too.

#359 on the Pop Thruster Best 1,000 Albums Ever list