Radiohead is not so much a band as an experiment: an ambitious effort to redefine sound, their sound, into music wholly original and unpredictable — highly experimental, yet grounded, accessible. And they have succeeded, are succeeding, at this.
Radiohead is as inscrutable as it is obvious, as sublime as it is paranoid and hysterical. It has put out albums that are brutally literal and almost conventional in their intentions and effects — Pablo Honey, The Bends (about a third of it, at least) — and it has produced sonic explorations shot full of kaleidoscopic musical swoopings and swoonings from a high-wire act that is trembling and quaking in the wind, no net of course — cf., OK Computer and Kid A, two albums that are clearly not conventional. Their music is off putting, at times, and overly theatrical; and yet brilliantly charming and tender and seductive.
Radiohead has spurned beauty, however we define it, in its music nearly as often as it has embraced heartbreaking and aching melodies too seemingly simple to come from this most enigmatic and experimental of bands (but not experiment for its own sake, no doubt about that.) Thom Yorke’s voice is both keening and tender; haunted and carefree. Yorke’s voice itself is a perpetual high wire act.
Is Radiohead really even a band (see above)? Nominally, of course. But even to call them a band somehow detracts from their collective spirit, their unique and ghostly assemblage of sensibilities, most notably embodied by Thom Yorke — imp, banshee, little boy lost, genius. Really, they are an amalgam of disparate but compatible musical instincts, and not only in the sounds they entice from some seemingly soul-purchased genie bottle, but increasingly in the business decisions they've made regarding how their music is distributed — in these ways, Radiohead is simply defining a new category of musician and musicianship. And the category has no name and probably never will and we'd reject it, rightly, if it did.
So where’s this all going? Here: EMI’s forthcoming release Radiohead: The Best of is slated to drop in early June.Given the preface to this “review,” is it likely that this reviewer would have a strong response to a Radiohead greatest hits, so to speak? Of course not. Radiohead has had hits in its career, especially early on with Creep, later with Fake Plastic Trees and Paranoid Android. But Radiohead is not a greatest hits band; it’s not even a singles band. With the exception perhaps of its first two LPs — Pablo Honey (1993); The Bends (1995) — their albums simply don’t work (read: don’t make sense) unless heard in their entirety. Even then they require an effort from the listener, and “getting it,” whatever exactly that means, usually does mean multiple listens.
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