After years of waiting, nothing came

Continuing my trip back through the 2001 album charts.

17/06/01 : Amnesiac - Radiohead


Our sixth visit with them Radiohead funsters (making them the eleventh act to reach this milestone) and I'm not sure this is one I've ever listened to - I was so traumatised by Kid A that I've tended to avoid anything they've done afterwards unless forced to visit it to post about it. But I have to admit that some of them have been pleasingly bearable, so I at least have some hope for this.

Yeah, it seems OK to me - there are certainly some challenging sounds on it, but I didn't hate it. I think I'd go as far as saying I actually enjoyed "Knives Out" - but I was not a fan of "Life In A Glasshouse". Part of me is intrigued as to whether this is actually all that different from Kid A, but it feels unlikely I'll ever be brave enough to find out. 

We're at #7 in the charts this week on their second week of a seventeen week run, with it having peaked at #1 in its debut week. The top five this week were Travis (a new entry starting a run of four weeks at the top), Shaggy, an Eagles best-of, Blink 182 (another new entry) and Dido with the next highest new entry being a Roxy Music best-of (#12).

Wikipedia has a load of text (271 milliPeppers) which tells us this is their fifth album and was recorded in the same sessions as Kid A, with the initial intention to release it all as a double album but they decided (correctly in my opinion) that that would just be a bit too much. It's actually a pretty decent entry with quite a few interesting facts in there including that for "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" they "disabled the erase heads on the tape recorders so that the tape repeatedly recorded over itself" which feels like a very Radioheady thing to do. Also, "Life In A Glasshouse" features Humphrey Lyttleton and his band and it sounds like there was somewhat of a culture clash between the 80 year old jazz legend and the overly serious youngsters. 

Critically, the reviews were pretty decent although people couldn't agree whether it was better or worse than Kid A - Thom suggested that it "was no more accessible than Kid A and would have elicited the same reactions had it been released first" which sounds pretty reasonable to me. Commercially, it did well, getting to #1 in Austria, Canada, Finland, Ireland and New Zealand and #2 in the US, selling 2.5 million copies globally.

discogs.com tells us you're going to have to spend a whole three pounds to get hold of a decent copy of this but if you want the double 10" vinyl version (again very Radioheady) then it's going to set you back £192.77. I'm not sure I'd say I enjoyed this, but it was an interesting listen and I feel that multiple revisits would probably reveal more. But that ain't gonna happen.

24/06/01 - An enjoyable revisit


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