Radiohead - The Bends (1995) 2CD+DVD, Japanese Special Edition 2009

When Capitol released a few different shortcuts through Radiohead's career late last year, we were indifferent to its cause, citing a lack of need and poor selection. Most fervent Radiohead fans would have wasted their money buying these packages, and most people interested in the band would be best served by their actual albums. Well, Capitol has now begun to roll out those parent albums– starting with the group's three 1990s releases (Pablo Honey, The Bends, OK Computer)– again, without the band's participation. This time, however, the label is doing it right, dressing the releases up with the right accoutrements: B-sides from the era (and since the era overlapped with two-part CD singles, there are plenty), radio sessions, and music videos.

For an epochal, era-defining band, Radiohead had an unusual beginning, looking like they'd wind up one-hit wonders, chancers callously attaching themselves to a sound and moment yet with few ideas of their own. That first hit, "Creep", with its loud/soft dynamic and self-loathing lyric, fit snugly into the post-Nirvana alt-rock landscape– no surprise: Radiohead copped as much from 80s indie rock as their Pac NW brethren did. Yet instead of being hamstrung by platinum success, Radiohead abandoned careerist moves for artistic ambitions, moving quickly to incorporate the record-collector's music of post-rock and Mo Wax, the post-dance, spiritually nurturing end of UK rock, and the pre-millennial tension of IDM and trip-hop.

By the end of the 90s, Radiohead hadn't supplanted U2, R.E.M., Oasis, and Metallica as the world's biggest rock band. But it was largely agreed upon that they were the world's best– and with hindsight, arguably, along with the White Stripes, the last indie-friendly group to conquer the world and punch in the same weight class as early 90s alt-rock giants like Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, Green Day, or Red Hot Chili Peppers. That they used this critical and commercial currency to such dazzling effect on Kid A and Amnesiac is still one of the highlights of this decade; that the press, especially in the UK, chose the more familiar and necrophiliac "new rock revolution" over the relatively pioneering Radiohead is one of the decade's lows.

UK rock, for all its heady artistry and visionaries throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s, had been slumming it a bit when Radiohead first emerged. Size and grandeur, which would become the goals for too many UK guitar bands by the end of the Britpop era, were largely missing from that country's indie scene when Radiohead started recording in 1992. Sure, the Stone Roses had trumpeted their own greatness a few years earlier, but most of the era's indie music was introspective, bands content to gaze at their shoes rather than aim for the back of the venue.

Radiohead's early, full-bodied music was, in most circles then, dismissed as empty Americanisms– and not without reason. The expansive Pablo Honey set– the 12-song album accompanied by 22 extras– mostly highlights a group in hock to U.S. indie heroes Pixes and Dinosaur Jr. (with the occasional R.E.M. homage tossed in– see: "Lurgee"). The loose "Anyone Can Play Guitar" and delicate "Thinking About You" thankfully break up the 120-minute mood, but most of the rest of the album is squarely in the post-grunge wheelhouse. That's not always a bad thing: "Stop Whispering", opener "You", and a re-recorded version of early single "Prove Yourself" hold up well– and "Creep" has oddly gotten better with age. Elsewhere, the dreadful "Pop Is Dead", and songs like "How Do You?", "I Can't", "Ripcord", and "Vegetable" are run of the mill at best.

If Pablo Honey didn't betray hints of the band Radiohead would become, neither did its B-sides. Unlike contemporaries such as Blur, who used their non-album material to explore new ideas or moods, Radiohead's Pablo Honey-era work is primarily lesser versions of the album. The extra material kicks off with their debut release, the Drill EP, which features three rudimentary versions of LP tracks, plus "Stupid Car", the first of Thom Yorke's odd automobile-themed fixations (still to come: "Killer Cars", "Airbag", the "Karma Police" video…) From there, it's a mishmash of alternate takes and also-rans (highlight: the U.S. single version of "Stop Whispering"), with only the shoegazey "Coke Babies" and an acoustic version of early political commentary "Banana Co." (released in much better form on The Bends package) worth exploring more than a few times.

I distinctly remember then the first time someone suggested The Bends was a great record. Not being one of the million-plus Pablo Honey owners at the time, I was content to hear "Creep" on the radio over and over and expected I'd soon spend about as much about time with Radiohead's catalog as one would with, say, Hum or Ned's Atomic Dustbin or School of Fish. The My Iron Lung EP had beaten The Bends to U.S. record shelves by a few months, and the "High and Dry" / "Planet Telex" single was out a few weeks prior as well, but few noticed. Anyone who had explored those two earlier singles, however, would have been excited for the LP.

A reaction to the success of "Creep", "My Iron Lung" found Radiohead still exploring the loud/soft dynamic, but guitarist Jonny Greenwood was also locating his own identity and Yorke, inspired by Jeff Buckley, was using a wider vocal range, including some falsetto. Balancing a slightly artier sense of musical self-destruction with a sinewy guitar line, on "Lung" Radiohead found new ways to pick apart and re-construct the typical alt-rock template. Elsewhere on the EP, the five B-sides demonstrated a band whose collective heads seemed to crack open and spill out new ideas, moving the group away from the dour dead-end of grunge signifiers: With more loose-limbed and nimble guitar work ("The Trickster"), hints of art-rock ("Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong"), the valuing of texture over riffs ("Permanent Daygliht"), offers of emotional nourishment ("Lozenge of Love" and "You Never Wash Up After Yourself") and tension and apprehension about workaday life ("Lewis [Mistreated]"), and themes of misanthropy (um, most of the five songs), these tracks pointed the way toward what was to come.

The band's next release, the "High and Dry" / "Planet Telex" single, announced that they'd arrived. "Planet Telex", an early exploration with loops and studio enhancements for the group, is their first song that could have fit on any of their albums, regardless of how experimental they grew; "High and Dry", meanwhile, is the blueprint for the big-hearted balladry that spawned the careers of imitators Travis, Starsailor, Elbow, and Coldplay (who, let's face it, wound up perfecting this sort of huggable, swelling arena rock).

The Bends was essentially split between these poles: warmth and tension; riffs and texture; rock and post-rock. The tricks employed by "Planet Telex" were rarely bested on it– only arguably by "Just"– while the "High & Dry" version of the band was topped at every turn here, especially on "Street Spirit (Fade Out") and "Fake Plastic Trees". Even B-sides such "Bishop's Robes" and "Talk Show Host" come close to matching "High".

To many fans, this more approachable and loveable version of the band is its peak. I can't agree, but the record is still a marvel. It feels, with hindsight, like a welcome retreat from the incessant back-patting and 60s worship of prime-period Britpop and a blueprint for the more feminine, emotionally engaging music that would emerge in the UK a few years later– led by OK Computer. Alongside late 1996 or 1997 releases by Verve, Spiritualized, Belle and Sebastian, Cornershop, Mogwai, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Primal Scream, Super Furry Animals, the Beta Band, Mansun, and even Britpop stars Blur, Radiohead's OK Computer led the push back against knuckle-dragging Oasis clones who segregated their Boomer rock leanings from the fertile explorations of dance, classic indie, hip-hop, and art-school sensibilities going on throughout the rest of the UK. But once again, the press chose what they knew over the new, and despite the plaudits for 2000's Kid A, by the time of 2001's Amnesiac, people wanted another The Bends.

OK Computer was the balance everyone agreed upon though– real songs and tunes, but ones that didn't shrink from the increasingly unlimited possibilities of modern music-making. In that sense, Radiohead were not only record-collectors but futurists, approaching the 21st century from the perspective of their day rather than from the generation prior, as Stereolab, Broadcast, Tortoise, and others were doing (to wonderful effect, granted). Discounting the breather "Fitter Happier", only "Electrioneering" seems like a misstep on the album today, with the white-knuckle "Climbing Up the Walls" and pre-album teaser "Lucky" now standing firmly alongside more entrenched highlights "Paranoid Android", "No Surprises", "Karma Police", and "Let Down".

The record's B-sides are no less rewarding, especially "Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2)" and "Melatonin", which would have fit fine on LP itself. "Palo Alto" proves they could do light and tongue-in-cheek, while "Meeting in the Aisle" makes you wonder why they don't record more instrumentals. The group's eventual fascination with, for a successful 90s guitar band, relatively foreign sounds like IDM and 20th century classical music found root around this time and it's on these extras where they first explored these notions.

Maybe you don't need to buy these again, maybe you own the material already. If you do, sure– pass. If you have the LPs but stopped there, both The Bends and OK Computer are worth getting in these versions. If you're curious or a completist, Pablo Honey is out there, too. That the band had nothing to do with these is beside the point: This is the final word on these records, if for no other reason that the Beatles' September 9 remaster campaign is, arguably, the end of the CD era. That all of those discs are coming out at the same time, rather than being slowly and ceremoniously rolled out as they were 20-odd years ago, is a tacit acknowledgment by the music industry that they best sell non-vinyl physical products now, immediately, before the prospect of doing so is gone. With that in mind, I find it wise that many bands are wisely re-organizing their pasts, or having it done for them by their label. So long as it's done like this, I'm happy to re-purchase the stuff.

Review by Scott Plagenhoef, Pitchfork.com

Exact Audio Copy V1.0 beta 3 from 29. August 2011

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Exact Audio Copy V1.0 beta 3 from 29. August 2011

EAC extraction logfile from 25. February 2012, 21:43

Radiohead / The Bends <Collector's Edition> (Disc-2)

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