25 years of Radiohead's The Bends 🎸

Radiohead released their second album, The Bends, 25 years ago today, on March 13, 1995.

Radiohead fans can endlessly debate which album is the band's best, but to me, the answer has always been The Bends. Of course, later albums took Radiohead's experimentation much further, deconstructing the very idea of a rock band. The Bends was more subtly radical. It might have seemed to be merely developing the same style as "Creep," the hit that put them on the map from their first album. But underneath the surface, The Bends hinted at the staggering changes to come. It was an evolution pointing to revolution. The Bends was Radiohead's Rubber Soul.

When I made a quick list of "the 20 albums that made the biggest impression on me when I was a teenager" in response to a Facebook meme a few years ago, The Bends was one of the easiest choices.

How many albums have so many great songs, and no filler? Even the least memorable songs on The Bends are still excellent.

Here are some of my favorites from the album, live:

"Planet Telex" (album version)

Everything is broken

Everyone is broken…

Why can't you forget?

"The Bends" (album version)

Where do we go from here?

The planet is a gunboat in a sea of fear

"Just" (the enigmatic music video)

You do it to yourself

You do

And that's why it really hurts

"Nice Dream" (album version)

They love me like I was a brother

They protect me

Listen to me

They dug me my very own garden

Gave me sunshine

Made me happy

"Fake Plastic Trees" (album version)

She looks like the real thing…

My fake plastic love

(10 things you didn't know about The Bends.)

The 100 Best Songs of the 2010s (51-60)

Now halfway through the 100 best songs of the decade…

(Click here for the whole list so far, with a Spotify playlist.)


60. Red Hot Chili Peppers — "Dark Necessities"




59. Radiohead — "Burn the Witch"




58. Muse — "Madness"

(Cover by the Pretty Reckless.)




57. Dream Theater — "Barstool Warrior"

Dream Theater might be the most technically complex rock band in the world, but this is one of their more accessible songs. "Barstool Warrior" also makes up for the songs on this list that glorify excessive drinking…




56. OK Go — "I Won't Let You Down"

This amazing video must be watched from beginning to end! (I recommend "full screen" mode.)




55. Green Day — "Brutal Love"




54. Fitz and The Tantrums — "Don't Gotta Work It Out"




53. Esperanza Spalding — "Elevate or Operate"




52. Gotye (feat. Kimbra) — "Somebody That I Used to Know"




51. nine inch nails — "copy of a"

(Album version.)

(Here are my blog posts about NIИ's first and second albums.)




<— 61 - 70

41 - 50 —>

Two great albums by British rock bands came out on this day.

Radiohead released their fourth album, Kid A, 15 years ago, on October 2, 2000.

Here's a whole Radiohead concert from around that time, including most of the songs on Kid A and a couple older favorites:


 

Oasis released their second album, (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, 20 years ago, on October 2, 1995.

Radiohead — The Bends turns 20

Radiohead released their best album, The Bends, 20 years ago today.

Here's a full concert from that era (including at least one preview from their next album, OK Computer, which came out the next year).

Radiohead's new album, The King of Limbs

My impression on first listen to the new Radiohead album: it's like a watered-down version of a lot of their past work. They've gone on autopilot.

The King of Limbs sounds most like their previous album, In Rainbows, which I wasn't a big fan of either. But at least In Rainbows had 2 standouts: "All I Need" and "Nude." I'm not hearing any standouts on The King of Limbs.

The album is fine, not bad. But Radiohead used to be in the forefront of interesting, challenging new music. They're now just one more band.

Here's "Lotus Flower" from The King of Limbs:

Radiohead in concert -- amateur video, professional audio

A group of Radiohead fans went to a recent show in Prague "on a mission to capture the band playing using as many different angles as possible." Radiohead found out about this and provided the audio so that the fans could piece everything together into proper videos.

Here are a few of the songs. You can see them all here.

I am a bit shocked by how much they've turned their backs on their great '90s albums, The Bends and OK Computer.

"2 + 2 = 5"




"Airbag"




"All I Need"




"Nice Dream"

The 100 best songs of the first decade of the 2000s (20-11)

(Click here for the whole list.)


20. Spoon — "The Beast and Dragon, Adored"




19. Radiohead — "How to Disappear Completely"




18. Rilo Kiley – "Does He Love You?"

(Live.)




17. Beyoncé (feat. Jay-Z) — "Crazy in Love"

Credit is also due to the Chi-Lites; the brass-section hook is sampled from their 1971 song "Are You My Woman? (Tell Me So)."




16. Björk – "Hidden Place"

A great introversion song. The build-up from the final verse ("Can I hide there too?") to the final chorus is quietly overwhelming. She gets so much feeling out of singing the words slightly off from the beat.




15. Regina Spektor – "Us"




14. Goldfrapp – "A&E"

When I said one of the criteria I used in deciding whether to include a song on the list was ...

Does the music have some sort of dramatic arc or development? (A bridge or other deviation from "verse/chorus/verse/chorus" is especially helpful.)

... this is one of the songs I had in mind. Wow!




13. The Flaming Lips — "Do You Realize??"

A song that gets great emotion out of stating simple facts, like: We're floating in space…




12. Frou Frou – "Let Go"

(Unplugged version by Imogen Heap, the singer of Frou Frou.)




11. Death Cab for Cutie – "I Will Follow You into the Dark"

Runners-up for the best songs of the first decade of the 2000s

As promised, I'm going to list the 100 greatest songs of the 2000s. But first, here are 100 runners-up, in no particular order…

(Click here for the whole list.) 


Goldfrapp — "Caravan Girl"



The New Pornographers — "My Rights Versus Yours" — WATCH

Grizzly Bear — "Southern Point" — LISTEN

The Weepies — "Nobody Knows Me at All" — WATCH

Solange — "I Decided" — WATCH

MGMT — "The Youth"— WATCH

Regina Spektor — "Better" — WATCH

Death Cab for Cutie — "Title and Registration" – WATCH

Esperanza Spalding — "I Adore You" — LISTEN

Dirty Projectors — "Cannibal Resource" — LISTEN

Radiohead — "Everything in Its Right Place"



The Thrills — "One Horse Town" — WATCH

Rilo Kiley — "I Never" — LISTEN

Lady Gaga — "Paparazzi" — WATCH

The Postal Service — "Such Great Heights" — WATCH (cover by Iron & Wine)

Rufus Wainwright — "Shadows" — LISTEN

The Apples in Stereo — "Energy" — WATCH

Phoenix — "Lisztomania" — WATCH

of Montreal — "The Repudiated Immortals" — LISTEN

Yeah Yeah Yeahs — "Runaway" — WATCH

Hot Hot Heat — "Talk to Me, Dance with Me"



Elliott Smith — "Son of Sam" — WATCH

The Notwist — "One with the Freaks" — LISTEN

Black Eyed Peas — "Boom Boom Pow" — WATCH

Alicia Keys — "Karma" — WATCH

Dido — "White Flag" — WATCH

The Dodos — "God?" — LISTEN

Spoon — "The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine" — WATCH

Death Cab for Cutie — "Tiny Vessels" — LISTEN

Lali Puna — "Small Things" — LISTEN

The Bird and the Bee — "Love Letter from Japan"



St. Vincent — "Your Lips are Red" — WATCH

Radiohead — "2 + 2 = 5 (The Lukewarm.)" — WATCH

Iron & Wine — "Boy with a Coin" — WATCH

Clue to Kalo — "Seconds When It’s Minutes" — LISTEN

Herbert (feat. Dani Siciliano & Shingai Shoniwa) — "The Audience" — WATCH

Sufjan Stevens — "All Good Naysayers, Speak Up! Or Forever Hold Your Peace!" — LISTEN

Christina Aguilera — "Beautiful" — WATCH

Bosque Brown — "White Dove" — LISTEN

Yeasayer — "2080" — LISTEN

The Dresden Dolls — "Good Day"



Modest Mouse — "Float On" — WATCH

Arcade Fire — "My Body Is a Cage" — LISTEN

Hanne Hukkelberg — "Ease" — LISTEN

Styrofoam (feat. Ben Gibbard) — "Couches in Alleys" — LISTEN

The Go! Team — "Ladyflash" — WATCH

Monsters Are Waiting — "Crazy Love" — LISTEN

1990s — "See You at the Lights" — LISTEN

Wilco — "I'm the Man Who Loves You" — WATCH

John Mayer — "Daughters" — WATCH

Camera Obscura — "Let’s Get Out of This Country"



The Shins — "New Slang" — WATCH

Psapp — "Hi" — WATCH

Cut Copy — "Feel the Love" — LISTEN 

Amerie — "1 Thing" — WATCH

David Byrne & Brian Eno — "Strange Overtones" — WATCH

Lenka — "Trouble Is a Friend" — WATCH

Decoder Ring — "Traffic" — LISTEN

Foo Fighters — "The Pretender" — WATCH

Beck — "Lonesome Tears" — WATCH

Andrew Bird — "A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left"



of Montreal — "The Party’s Crashing Us"— LISTEN

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings — "100 Days, 100 Nights" — WATCH

Spoon — "The Way We Get By" — WATCH

Goldfrapp — "Ride a White Horse" — WATCH

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah — "Is This Love?" — LISTEN

Estelle (feat. Kanye West) — "American Boy" — WATCH

Jason Mraz — "I'm Yours" — LISTEN

The Strokes — "Someday" — WATCH

Death Cab for Cutie — "Transatlanticism" — LISTEN

Norah Jones — "Sinkin’ Soon"



St. Vincent — "Actor out of Work" — WATCH

The Sea and Cake — "Left Side Clouded" — WATCH

OutKast — "B.O.B. — Bombs over Baghdad" — WATCH

Animal Collective — "Peacebone" — LISTEN

Sara Bareilles — "Bottle It Up" — WATCH

Jenny Lewis — "Black Sand" — LISTEN

nine inch nails — "all the love in the world" — LISTEN

The Postal Service — "We Will Become Silhouettes" — WATCH

Goldfrapp — "Monster Love" — LISTEN

TV on the Radio — "Dreams"



Ms. John Soda — "Hands" — LISTEN

The Temper Trap — "Sweet Disposition" — WATCH

Arcade Fire — "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" — WATCH

M. Ward (feat. Zooey Deschanel) — "Never Had Nobody Like You" — LISTEN

The Strokes — "Hard to Explain" — WATCH

of Montreal — "Forecast Fascist Future" — LISTEN

Rihanna — "Disturbia" — WATCH

Radiohead — "Optimistic" — WATCH

Death Cab for Cutie — "Soul Meets Body" — WATCH

Bruce Springsteen — "The Rising"



MGMT — "Electric Feel" — WATCH

Sophie Ellis-Bextor — "Murder on the Dance Floor" — LISTEN

Amy Winehouse — "Rehab" — WATCH

Franz Ferdinand — "Jacqueline" — LISTEN

My Brightest Diamond — "Golden Star" — LISTEN

Green Day — "Wake Me Up When September Ends" — LISTEN

Broken Social Scene — "Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl" — WATCH

St. Vincent — "Black Rainbow" — LISTEN

The Postal Service — "Brand New Colony" — LISTEN

Music Friday: 4 more covers

For the third Friday in a row, here are 4 adventurous covers. (You can go to all of them by clicking the "covers" tag.)

9. Ben Folds covers...



...The Postal Service.




10. Tori Amos covers...



...Nirvana.




11. Dr. Fox's Old Timey String Band covers...



MGMT. (Blogged previously.)




12. Brad Mehldau covers...



...Radiohead.

What's so bad about product placement?

Tom Lee says (via Matthew Yglesias):

A decade ago I might not have noticed the subtly-placed Aquafina bottle in the medical examiner's office in The Spirit; now, trained by decades of carefully turned-toward-the-camera product labels on network sitcoms, I couldn't help but see it. Although I'm sure that its presence still made some small, brand-reinforcing impression, it's a minute one compared to the success that this technique must have first enjoyed. And, in this case, it was coupled with a healthy dose of resentment at Aquafina for its commercial intrusion into entertainment I'd already paid for.

Have you ever noticed how in old movies and TV shows, before people came up with the idea of product placement, it seems like there are no brands or logos anywhere? It's this weirdly cartoonish, smoothed-out world where every soda or beer bottle is a solid brown blob.

Is that because they were making sure that no brands/logos were visible, based on some kind of purist aesthetic?

Or were logos in real life just not as visible back then?

I assume it's a bit of both, but probably mostly the former. Prominent logos have been around for as long as movies have been around. I'm sure that brand identity has affected people's lives more in recent decades, but brands weren't invisible before.

Even before the invention of product placement as a money-making scheme, why wouldn't the filmmakers say: "Hey, let's fill in the details of what people are doing"?

It's so easy to criticize and mock product placement: transparent attempts at subtlety, art infected by greed, etc.

But to "resent" a placed product, as Tom Lee says he does? That strikes me as not just unwarranted but ungrateful.

People love to criticize movies like the Back to the Future trilogy for being full of brand names, but is it so obvious the movie would look better if they'd made it 100% generic? If you're depicting ordinary people in the industrialized world, isn't it only fitting to see them wearing Nikes and drinking Pepsis?

We should be thankful that product placement came along and made the movies and TV more realistic. Just think how drab and oversimplified they'd look without it.

Like this:




(Photo of NYC's Times Square by Jon Ander Rabadan. Photo of cola cans from Wikimedia Commons.)

I'm not here. This isn't happening. I'm not here...

I usually do a music post on Fridays, but it seems a bit gaudy after the September 11 post.

So here's a song for you: "How to Disappear Completely." (Lyrics.)

Radiohead couldn't have been writing this about the attacks, because the song came out in 2000. But with its eerie pall and relentless trudge, it sounds like it was written about that day.

The 40 greatest grunge songs (10-6)

(Click here for the whole list.)

And the top 10 grunge songs are...


10. The Toadies - Possum Kingdom

Unusually intelligent rock music.

Everything about this music -- the chord progressions, the asymmetrical meter, the adventurous song structure -- shows that they're thinking things through more than most bands. This only enhances, doesn't detract from, the emotion.




9. Nirvana - All Apologies

1-chord verse + 2-chord bridge = greatness

This is performance is from 1992, before the band recorded the song, so it's wonderfully rough around the edges:




8. Jane's Addiction - Mountain Song

One of those "this is what it's all about" songs. Very straightforward, but everything just comes together here.

Don't miss the guitar solo, in which Dave Navarro reins in his virtuosity just enough to avoid glam-rock territory.




7. Sonic Youth - Bull in the Heather

They're such a monumentally important and influential band that it feels wrong to pigeonhole them as "grunge." But I think this song fits in pretty well, with Kim Gordon's "I'm too lazy to sing an actual melody" ethos.

And those guitar noises!

10, 20, 30, 40...




6. Radiohead - Just

This is why Jonny Greenwood is an acclaimed guitarist. How many rock bands are even aware of the existence of the octatonic scale (a.k.a. diminished scale), let alone able to use it to such wonderfully stomach-churning effect?

Here's the famously enigmatic video:




ANNOUNCEMENT: Next week will be 100%, solid, uninterrupted grunge, as I unveil the top 5 songs, Monday through Friday, one day at a time! Stay tuned...

>>> #5 >>>

The 40 greatest grunge songs (25-21)

(Click here for the whole list.)


25. Hole - Violet

From the band's unlistenable first album to their immaculate second album (which this song is from) is probably the most extreme, sudden improvement I've ever heard from any band. Gee, it's almost as if Courtney Love had someone else helping her out with the songwriting for the second album.




24. Blind Melon - No Rain

This isn't technically "grunge," but it fits in with the era. And I couldn't make a list of songs from the '90s without including this.

Don't make fun of bumblebee girl!

All I can do is just pour some tea for two, and speak my point of view...




23. Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun

It's hard to even hear this song for what it is since it's been so overplayed. The labyrinthine nine-chord progression of the verse is a rarity -- more akin to the Beach Boys' "Don't Talk, Put Your Head on My Shoulder" or the Beatles' "Because" than the average song from the '90s. These guys were really on a whole other level from most bands.

And isn't this the creepiest video ever?



Speaking of creepy, there happen to be two songs on this list called...


22. Stone Temple Pilots - Creep

Acoustic grunge. Taking a lyrical cue from Paul McCartney, Weiland laments his own inadequacy.




21. Radiohead - Creep

This is such a great little early '90s alternative-rock track, with its soft/loud formula and marketable alienation. Who would have ever thought the band that became famous through this song would go on to the staggering innovation and artistic achievements of its later works? Classic moment: the guitar noise right before the chorus. When I asked AskMetafilter for help with this list, one person said: "Ahem. Radiohead were never grunge." So I guess you think this song ... doesn't belong here?



UPDATE: IM response: "nice to have the 2 creeps together"

>>> Go to #20-16 >>>