1 - It's a huge step up from their first album
"Pablo Honey." Pablo was ah-ight but other than the song
Creep, it's kind of a take-it-or-leave-it, mid-90's alt-rock artifact. Sure, it
showed some promise, but the band didn't really become Radiohead with a
capital-R until "The Bends" in 1995. They dialed everything up; the
production, the song-writing, the musicianship, the vocal delivery, the lyrical
themes, everything. Unlike Pablo, which has one great song and a bunch of
hum-drum alt-pop filler, practically every song on "The Bends" could
work as a stand-alone single, and many of them were. Songs like Just, High and
Dry, Fake Plastic Trees, My Iron Lung, Black Star and Street Spirits (fade out)
are all significantly better than the Pixies-lite quaintness of Creep, which is
the type of first-impression catchy song that would have made any lesser band become an instant one-hit-wonder.
2 – This was kind of the album that indirectly got me into Radiohead, but it wasn't the first album of theirs that I fell in love with. Let me explain. Some point as a kid I had heard the song High and Dry on the radio or in a movie or something and its verse-melody got stuck in my brain without any accreditation as to who did it. Like most non-fans, I had heard and mildly enjoyed Creep and I kind of knew Radiohead got weird (or whatever) after that, and I had really paid no greater attention to them. In my later teens when I randomly saw the video for High and Dry on MTV2 I flipped out, immediately wanting to go out and buy the CD. However, when I made it to a record store to buy “The Bends” they didn't have it, so I settled with “OK Computer,” per recommendation of the store clerk. Of course “OK Computer” totally blew my mind, and in many ways it’s the superior album, but after a few weeks of binging on that, I bought “The Bends” and was satisfied to have that musical mystery in my life finally solved.
3 – It was my go-to homework CD. Back in high school, when homework amounted to copying terms and definitions from the back of a text-book and doing short chapter review question assignments, I would play “The Bends” in the background to keep me from dying of boredom. Not much else to say about that other than this album comes with a lot of teenage nostalgia for me, as it probably does for the people who were teens at the time of its original release. Most other records by them would have been too moody or required too much attention to work as pleasing background noise, but “The Bends” is perfect for chilling out or concentrating on something else. It's kind of a “house-cleaning” record in that way.
2 – This was kind of the album that indirectly got me into Radiohead, but it wasn't the first album of theirs that I fell in love with. Let me explain. Some point as a kid I had heard the song High and Dry on the radio or in a movie or something and its verse-melody got stuck in my brain without any accreditation as to who did it. Like most non-fans, I had heard and mildly enjoyed Creep and I kind of knew Radiohead got weird (or whatever) after that, and I had really paid no greater attention to them. In my later teens when I randomly saw the video for High and Dry on MTV2 I flipped out, immediately wanting to go out and buy the CD. However, when I made it to a record store to buy “The Bends” they didn't have it, so I settled with “OK Computer,” per recommendation of the store clerk. Of course “OK Computer” totally blew my mind, and in many ways it’s the superior album, but after a few weeks of binging on that, I bought “The Bends” and was satisfied to have that musical mystery in my life finally solved.
3 – It was my go-to homework CD. Back in high school, when homework amounted to copying terms and definitions from the back of a text-book and doing short chapter review question assignments, I would play “The Bends” in the background to keep me from dying of boredom. Not much else to say about that other than this album comes with a lot of teenage nostalgia for me, as it probably does for the people who were teens at the time of its original release. Most other records by them would have been too moody or required too much attention to work as pleasing background noise, but “The Bends” is perfect for chilling out or concentrating on something else. It's kind of a “house-cleaning” record in that way.
4 – It’s just a great rock record. This was before Radiohead became
so well known for their experimentation and oblique song-crafting style. "The Bends" plays with rock conventions, for sure, and it’s not a mindless,
riff-based pop album, but its style is still in service to the song, as is the
instrumentation and the production. It’s just 12, very well crafted rock tunes
with no pretensions of being anything other than that. This isn't to
say I hate Radiohead’s artsy freak-outs like “Kid-A” or the stranger, more
electro-prog moments of their later records--those were directions they needed to go
as artists--but this album finds the band at a comfortable place in their
career when they had damn-near perfected the pop-rock formula. The
guitar sound is bright and dymanic, the songwriting is excited, and Thom York’s voice
never sounded better. The lyrics aren't overtly happy or uplifting
per-se, but certainly not as heady or world-weary as they would become.The album does hint ever so slightly to their future though with the densely layered, melancholic, chorus-less closing track Street Spirits (fade out).
5 - This was a Radiohead we would only get for one record and we’ll never get them back, and that’s okay. The album we got just right after, "Ok Computer," advanced their whole trajectory to somewhere else new and exciting in its own way, and the band hasn't looked back since. That’s the best part of being a Radiohead fan, wondering what they’re going to try next. I might say that ever since “Hail to the Theif” they have pretty much settled into an eclectic mix of everything they have done from “OK Computer” on, but “The Bends” exists in perfection just outside of their current paradigm. It's both a time-capsule and timeless.
5 - This was a Radiohead we would only get for one record and we’ll never get them back, and that’s okay. The album we got just right after, "Ok Computer," advanced their whole trajectory to somewhere else new and exciting in its own way, and the band hasn't looked back since. That’s the best part of being a Radiohead fan, wondering what they’re going to try next. I might say that ever since “Hail to the Theif” they have pretty much settled into an eclectic mix of everything they have done from “OK Computer” on, but “The Bends” exists in perfection just outside of their current paradigm. It's both a time-capsule and timeless.
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