The Bends

The Bends - Click Title To Play

Well, like I think I said in an earlier post, I was a little late to the game in terms of my appreciation for Radiohead. This song from their second album has long been one of my favorites though. As opposed to say, Karma Police, this (to me, at least) is a more typical Radiohead song thematically. This one is all about alienation and isolation, which can be a nice change of pace sometimes. Can't always be listening to music about sunshine daydreams, can we?

The production on this record seemed to have stepped it up a bit from the debut (Pablo Honey) and was a step closer to the tripped out sounds on OK Computer- The guitars seemed heavier and the keyboards more involved. I've always thought one of the most differentiating things about the band was the massive amount of time Thom Yorke sings in falsetto. At the time these records were coming out, he's about the only guy I can think of that was doing this. I read recently that the band consciously decided to move away from the sound of some of these 90's albums due to the fact that crap bands like Coldplay sort of adopted the sound. When you're as good as these guys are, I guess you can just be confident that you'll find yourself another awesome sound. Kind of like U2 has been doing for 25 years or so.

Doesn't it always seem to happen like that, though? A great, original band comes out with a groundbreaking sound and within 6 months there are a bunch of shitty bands commandeering that 'sound'. It happened with Nirvana, and with Zeppelin in the 70s before them. I'm sure it happened to someone in the 1980s too. That's just how the record industry looks at things - like it's a formula that can be repeated over and over.

Anyway, this was fun to record as a goof, but I think I'll go back to some more straight ahead acoustic songs.