1001 Albums Summary

Pretty forgettable

On one hand, this is a blessed album, overflowing with ideas and ambition and beauty. The production style influenced almost every rock band I love today. On the other hand, the ceiling on how much I could like the style of music Brian Wilson made is like a 3/5. Let's split the difference. Also, "A Mouthful of Sores" has permanently tarnished my ability to not giggle when I listen to the Beach Boys. IYKYK.

Going back in to add a fifth star. Listened to it again this morning and it's really breathtaking. I've always been a little put off by his voice over the course of a full album, but something clicked today.

I mean, it's Abbey Road. Every song is perfect*. The medley might be the pinnacle of their entire output (I still get chills when "Golden Slumber" gives way to "Carry That Weight") I'm so glad they stuck it out for "one last album" despite the imminent fracturing, and clearly** had so much fun doing it. What a gift this album was. Even the two silly songs are fun and well produced. And the medley... just 16 minutes exploding with creativity and musicianship and killer riffs and special moments for each member individually and as a foursome. What else is there to say? Amongst the most five-star albums to ever get five stars. *two silly songs probably excepted **from the various documentaries and outtakes you can hear if you want to do a deep dive

I distinctly remember the run-up to this album. The media narrative was that this was their concession to fans, a genuine guitar-rock album in the wake of the genre-bending experimentation of the previous year's Kid A. There was also a narrative that fans revolted. Certainly, there were still fans clamoring for a return to OK Computer, or even The Bends, but I was not one of them. Kid A enveloped me. It had my whole soul in its palms. For a minute there, I lost myself. I loved those earlier albums enough to welcome more, but I was a little disappointed to hear that the Kid A road ended there. I needn't have worried. If anything, Amnesiac is the more genre-bending and more experimental of the pair. Amnesiac wasn't an immediate masterpiece for me. For years, I would pop it on for specific songs, or skip a handful of tracks on my way to my favorites. But over time, it has become one of the records I return to the most, and it continues to reveal itself. In 2001, I would have argued that it was an elevated collection of B-sides, a series of experiments that didn't fit the tight construction of Kid A, from a band whose lack of ego and commercial ambition killed the possibility of a double album. But these tracks fit together in their own perfect way, each song leading into the next and taking you on a journey of the senses distinct from other Radiohead records. Each song here is a marvel. Even the immediately off-putting "Pulk / Pull Revolving Doors" creates a dense soundscape with a warm, tender center. There *are* guitar-forward bangers ("I Might Be Wrong") and songs that probably started as guitar-forward bangers ("Packt Like Sardines…", whose live version smokes.) But mostly it's a band full of astonishing musicians playing with the form; the slow burn of "You and Whose Army?" (now a live staple), the absent refrain of "Knives Out", a somehow more-trippy alternate version of "Morning Bell" that most of us assumed would be a guitar heavy rendition but instead recedes into layers of bells and keys. "Dollars & Cents" has suffocating tension. "Hunting Bears" can be a transcendental experience on an old country road late at night. On my crummy 2001 headphones, "Like Spinning Plates" sounded like being beamed into a UFO, and it's still otherworldly as I spin my worn vinyl copy on decent speakers. "Life in a Glasshouse" brings back the horn section from "The National Anthem" and invites them to a New Orleans funeral march; it's an unexpected ending to a wild snipe-hunt of an album. The crowning achievement is "Pyramid Song," maybe my second-favorite song in their canon. The plaintive piano, the soaring, gorgeous vocals draw something at once haunting and hopeful. It is perhaps the definitive song of this era; it swells as instruments layer, building not a wall of sound to pummel your senses, but a heightened presence of mystery and beauty as the song hypnotically takes you down the proverbial river, more flora and fauna and stars and black-eyed angels emerging as the song carries you to its conclusion. I was lucky enough to have my first live Radiohead experience in 2001 at an outdoor concert in Chicago's Grant Park, a beautiful area near the lake usually reserved for multi-day festivals. I was living in Iowa and just in town for the weekend for a college-related event, and someone I met at the function said they were playing that night and convinced me to go with him, even though neither of us had tickets, in hopes that the outdoor venue would still sound from outside the official perimeter. We skipped a big banquet-y event and braved public transportation (no small thing for a small-town-Iowa kid). We stood behind the fences to hear what we could of the main set, and snuck in when they opened the gates before the second encore (of three). Watching Thom do "True Love Waits" solo and the whole band do "Lucky," "Fake Plastic Trees," and "Street Spirit" was something of a spiritual experience, the culmination of seven years of loving a band more than I'd ever loved a band, growing with them and anticipating albums and being first shellshocked by what they put out there, and then having that music wrap itself around me like sinews of muscle on my bones. I heard something of God in their music, like they tapped into a hum underneath the surface of our reality (a feeling confirmed later in life, a story for another time and place.) Amnesiac takes me to my safest place, filled with mystery and wonder. It is their underappreciated gem in a catalog filled with "best album of all time" contenders. I think I'll flip to Side A again right now.