When the history of 90's rock is written, two bands will dominate it, bookends of the decade. The first band everyone wanted to be, and copied shamelessly. The second band everyone stood in awe of, and dared not imitate. Nirvana was the band that inaugurated the 1990's, and for many fans and musicians defined the sonic landscape of that decade. But by any objective standard, Radiohead owned that landscape, and expressed the zeitgeist for jaded critic and gushing fanboy alike.
For myself, I never much cared about Radiohead. I mean, we all heard "Creep" a hundred thousand million times back in the day, enough so that we began to sing along to it by sheer cultural osmosis. It hit the same sweet spot as "Comfortably Numb," allowing you to wallow in the melancholy that permeates late adolescence/young adulthood like water. But their titanic fin de siecle trilogy of albums -- OK Computer, Kid A, and Amnesiac -- made no dent on my consciousness. To date, I still haven't listened to the last two.
And when I first bought The Bends on a whim, a year or so ago, I didn't like it very much. It sounded like poorly-arranged emo masquerading as post-grunge. I threw it aside and gazed not upon it's gag-inducing cover (We're Deep! We're Whimsical! Did We Mention We're Deep?).
But duty called, and I started playing this again in preparation for writing this review, and it was a whole new world. I began to hear, to feel that tension that the critics kept mentioning in their fulsome reviews of Kid A, et al. And what was more, I was prepared to dig it.
1995 was a strange year. Nirvana was gone; the Pixies were gone. Grunge as a movement had more or less collapsed as a creative force, but a thousand bands were spinning wildly to make studious copies of the sensation. The results were as disparate as STP's later discs and Bush. On the other side of the pond, Britpop bands lovingly mined the old traditions of English Rock (John Savage said the movement should have been called Engrock), fashioning the formalism of Oasis and the fussiness of Blur.
The Bends features Radiohead nodding to these trends even as they began to move past them. The de rigeur fuzztone guitars and requisite Gen-X weltschmerz bleed all over this album. But the songs don't explode into transcendence the way Smashing Pumpkins songs tried to or Nirvana songs actually did. They move wryly, skillfully, lingering in the space they've created rather than jumping off as soon as they make their point.
This, I think, is the power that Radiohead had: they stayed, they worked, they kept getting better. They didn't stuff their veins with self-destruction; they described a destroyed world with honesty and heart.
I think I'm ready to hear OK Computer again.
Grade: L
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