As promised, here's the first in the Optical Files series, randomly chosen from a list of about 180 CDs in Cullen Wade's basement. If you are confused about what's happening or why it's happening on this blog, click here for an intro.
What a way to start off this series & the year! with the first, least-loved album by a key band of my adolescence. I bought Pablo Honey in 2002 out of obligation & completionism after falling in love with the 4 albums that followed it. Back then the prevailing wisdom was "Pablo Honey sucks except for 'Creep' & 'Anyone Can Play Guitar,'" & I can't say I disagreed. It's certainly my least-listened Radiohead album of the first 6. But this series is all about fresh perspectives, so I went into this listen ready to love it.
Aaaaaaand...this album is ok. Once you accept that it isn't as experimental or risk-taking as their later work (they hadn't hooked up with Nigel Godrich yet, after all), you meet it on its own terms. Before the electrofuturism & ambitious songwriting, what set Radiohead apart was their 3-guitar attack. Generally it works like this: one guitar (usually Ed) picks some melodic figure with a clean tone, a 2nd guitar (always Jonny) stabs it through with jagged, overdriven lick fragments, while the 3rd guitar (usually Thom) ostensibly plays rhythm but is mainly there to spew out noise. The songs where they dial that in ("Prove Yourself," "Blow Out," the back half of "Stop Whispering") are where the album comes alive with hypnotic harmonic texture & they sound like no other band. Not coincidentally, those songs also point toward what the band would do later: "Prove Yourself" sounds like one of the Bends B-sides; "Blow Out" anticipates the ominous bossa nova shuffle they'd perfect on "Knives Out" & "Dollars and Cents."
Like a lot of debuts, Pablo Honey also includes a few stylistic dead ends, the sound of a band figuring out what works. "How Do You?", the clearest example of the band's post-punk roots, sounds like Buzzcocks meets Wire, and "Thinking About You" is an unselfconscious Dylanesque acoustic ballad.
16 year-old Cullen was right about one thing, though: "Anyone Can Play Guitar" is the showstopper by a mile, a massive rocker that combines the best elements of pre-OK Computer Radiohead: that wall of noise, a twisty arrangement, an anthemic chorus of triumphant despair. Phil's drums sound huge here, reverb-drenched compared to the dry mix of the rest of the album, & little touches like the pre-chorus fills & the upshots he puts on the title phrase during the hook make this a deceptively tricky song to play air drums to. (Believe me, I did. I play air everything when I rock out to this song.)
If you've been waiting for me to talk about "Creep," feel free to continue waiting. In the meantime, I'm gonna go put on "Anyone Can Play Guitar" again.
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