Radiohead - Amnesiac (2001) Japanese Special Edition 2009 [2CD+DVD]

This DVD/2CD set includes a deluxe lift top box packaging and postcards. The DVD includes promo videos, footage from Top of the Pops from 2001, Later…With Jools Holland: 06/09/2001, and Top of the Pops: 08/17/2001. The CDs include the original album plus a CD with footage from Pyramid Song, Knives Out, Canal + Studios from 2001, and I Might Be Wrong - live recordings

You've released a series of masterpieces in a row, each more challenging and rewarding than the last. You're being called the greatest band in the world, and many want you to become the biggest. You've been charged with uniting and possibly leading a large group of listeners who spent the late-1990s exploring some combination of the outré genres of post-rock, IDM, exotica, Tropicália, and French house; the emotionally resonant yet textural sounds of artists like Björk, the Verve, Beck, Stereolab, and Spiritualized; and the once-potent but now flagging spheres of rave, jungle, and techno. In short, there's a hell of a lot of pressure on you.

Whether prescient or just fortunate, Radiohead never had to create a new set of songs under the weight of these expectations. Instead, they followed the instant-classic Kid A with what they had planned to do from the start: Relatively quickly issue another set of songs recorded at the same time, a lengthy studio-bound period that ate up much of 2000.

Appearing nine months after Kid A, Amnesiac faced an uphill climb as steep as the icy mountains that adorned the earlier record's cover. And so it was that the record was met with derisive "Kid B" jokes, sniffed at as pretentious, or considered the work of a band that had moved a little too far to the left. In the face of choosing between the forward-looking sounds of Radiohead and the revivalism hailed as the New Rock Revolution, a lot of listeners and critics chose the easy way out. Eventually, later in the decade, artists like the Knife, Animal Collective, Liars, and LCD Soundsystem would carry the mantle of blending genres and upsetting listener expectations in rewarding ways. But in 2001, in an era when the radio and MTV were still the primary delivery systems for new music– and after the majors felt burned by electronica, or by U2 and Smashing Pumpkins' ahead-of-the-game attempts to experiment with electronics in a stadium-rock setting– creatively ambitious guitar music was still considered a commercial misstep.

Amnesiac was in some ways another leap beyond Kid A, an album that already was heavily influenced by experimental electronic music, 20th century classical, and ambient music, and often featured the manipulation of singer Thom Yorke's voice and found Jonny Greenwood ditching his guitar for a compositional electronic instrument called the Ondes Martenot. To a generation raised on Pearl Jam and Oasis, it wasn't always easy listening.

Three other things handicapped the record from the go: First, the belief that, because these songs were released after those on Kid A, the band felt they were inferior, which has never been the case. Second, in order to ensure Amnesiac's summer 2001 release, Kid A wasn't promoted in a traditional manner: No singles were officially pulled from the record, and no videos were created. The band commissioned a series of online "blips," short films that preceded the record's release, but because the LP wasn't being milked for extra product it appeared to be a unique, complete piece unsullied by scrupulous promotion or overexposure. If you wanted to listen to Kid A, you listened to the CD, at a time of your choosing, generally front to back. As Rob Mitchum said in his review yesterday, for many, it was virtually the last record they engaged with in this way.

Amnesiac, by contrast, was promoted with singles, which gave it an aura of both ordinariness compared to Kid A and gave the impression that the band itself, threatening even then to dismantle the received wisdom about how to record, promote, and release music in the digital age, had caved to the wishes of their label.

More than all that, however, Amnesiac is the first album I can remember most everyone I know getting online in bits and pieces. In the slipstream between encoding mp3s and records leaking in full, songs would tend to dribble out one by one. For a record like Amnesiac, this was particularly disadvantageous. The word on Kid A was already that it flowed so perfectly as an album (which is half-true: Like Daft Punk's Discovery, also out that year, its first half does. But then each CD featured a palate-cleansing instrumental and a more traditional second half which, other than their respective finales, could have been arranged in arguably any order.)

For Amnesiac, the tracklisting is important because of the tension it creates rather than the comfortable way in which it flows. As a result, there are a number of songs that work as experiments or filling between more traditional pieces, and these tracks' power is heightened when you listen to the record straight through. When you've spent 30 minutes to download a song, you don't want to hear something like Robert Fripp homage "Hunting Bears" or leftfield excursions like "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" or "Like Spinning Plates". They work just fine as standalone songs to my mind, but many in 2001, upon first encountering them, felt cheated. No more so than with the band's decision to release a second version of Kid A's "Morning Bell". At the peak of the bloated CD era, when a record is already a "mere" 44 minutes long, spending three of those precious minutes re-working a song from your previous album wasn't a popular move.

Yet despite the supposed arm's-length coldness of Amnesiac, it's an emotionally resonant and often very warm record. When the group aims for rich, tonal undercurrents of sound beneath swelling, heart-lifting arrangements, on Amnesiac the songs are less likely to be buffered by electronic crackles and pops or swirling strings. The difference is most notable in that second version of "Morning Bell", but pick any of the album's more glacial, atmospheric songs and you have the blueprint for the band today. "Pyramid Song" and "You and Whose Army?" surely, but even rhythmic, vibrant songs like "I Might Be Wrong" and "Dollars & Cents" sound like the itchy, impatient way in which Radiohead today balance their rock and electronic impulses.

As a whole, the friction within a song like "I Might Be Wrong" is played out on a grand scale, heightened by some of Yorke's more aggressive lyrics. After the evocative, often lonesome and disconnected lyrics of Kid A, Amnesiac's snap more clearly into place and often are pointed or defensive. "You and Whose Army?" and "Knives Out" on their surface carry tinges of violence, while elsewhere Yorke pleads for people "to get off [his] case" or threatens to "crack your little souls."

The strains of paranoia that had run throughout Yorke's songs for a half-decade came most sharply into view on album closer, "Life in a Glasshouse", which oddly seems to predict the post-9/11 Bush administration's misguided warmongering (in Iraq), belief that patriotism is equated with obedience, and willingness to trade liberty if they believe it will bring security. The only song on Amnesiac recorded after the release of Kid A, it would also have been the only song recorded after the election of Bush, and with its stately, funereal New Orleans jazz arrangement it provides an earthy, traditional close to the forward-looking Kid A/Amnesiac.

Released again, with its grab bag of B-sides– some more interesting than lovable, but all worth hearing– and a few songs recorded in a Paris studio (all reconstructed enough to make them worthwhile, if a bit sterile at times in this environment), Amnesiac can ideally take its rightful place among Radiohead's acknowledged classics. More than Kid A– and maybe more than any other LP of its time– Amnesiac is the kickoff of a messy, rewarding era in which rather than owning records that were of a piece, we listen and engage with a wide variety of sounds in jumbled, sometimes confusing ways. And Amnesiac sounds like what the dawn of the mp3 era sounded like: disconnected, self-aware, tense, eclectic, head-turning– an overload of good ideas inhibited by rules, restrictions, and conventional wisdom.

Review by Scott Plagenhoef, Pitchfork.com

Amnesiac had trace elements of being a roundup of holdovers from Kid A that didn't quite fit that album's architecture, and its origins are echoed on EMI's expanded 2009 reissue of Amnesiac. Here, there are unheard songs and live cuts scattered among the B-sides, but nothing that could quite qualify as a major find – which makes sense, because the album itself grew from the outtakes of Kid A, so all the best material is on the album. Which isn't to say that the 15 tracks on the bonus disc are not worthwhile: some of the B-sides lean a little heavily on atmosphere, but they're often intriguing, and this contains another six songs from the band's excellent April 2001 set at Canal+ Studio, plus a version of "Like Spinning Plates," from the I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings EP. Again, the live versions tend to add warmth and muscle to studio constructions, so they're very worthwhile listening. [The three-disc set is even more worthwhile, as it contains the promo videos for "Pyramid Song," "Knives Out," "I Might Be Wrong," "Push Pulk/Spinning Plates," two separate Top of the Pops appearances where they perform "Pyramid Song" and "Knives Out," and four additional songs from their June 2001 spot on Later…With Jools Holland, added to the three originally featured on the Kid A DVD.]

Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Allmusic.com