I don't know if there will ever be an album I know better than The Bends thanks to the time I skipped school in 11th grade with my friend Kyle & the only tape I had in my car was this album so we just drove around all day playing it on loop. That's the kind of thing that burns a piece of music into your brain & you don't really get experiences like that anymore unless you deliberately create them, & even then they're not the same as when they arise organically. The Bends was my 1st Radiohead album, contains my 1st favorite Radiohead song ("Just"), & as is often the case with these things, I got burnt out on it in my early 20s & haven't really sat down with the whole thing in a long time. But of course that didn't matter, because the body stores music in the throat, fingers, toes, abdomen, & from the moment Thom's up-front, brickwalled vocals blew out of "Planet Telex" I found myself singing along, moving with those lavishly strummed chords like no time had passed, like reconnecting with an old friend & picking up where you left off.
Of course, feeling like no time has passed doesn't make it so, & it doesn't mean that nothing has changed. Some people view The Bends as Radiohead's 1st great album, & some view it as a transitional album that pointed toward the greatness of OK Computer. I used to be in the former camp, but today I find myself in the latter. Despite the sneering anticommercialism of "My Iron Lung," Radiohead were still interested in making radio hits, as attested to by the gentle Britpop of "High and Dry." Shades of Pablo Honey-isms are still evident in songs like "Sulk" & the epic "Black Star"--the latter of which is elevated by Colin Greenwood's animated bass playing. Another song that Colin enlivens is "Bones," but here we find a more sophisticated melody than anything on Pablo Honey &, crucially, an embrace of atonality. Jonny dials in a positively sickening lead guitar tone & the band brings their famous 3-guitar attack, which reached its pinnacle on this album in songs like "Just" (featuring Jonny's best guitar solo despite/because its opening 4 bars are just a squealing exploration of feedback tone) & "The Bends." I've always loved that title track as probably the clearest midpoint between this album's predecessor & its followup, the epic singalong chorus balanced by odd little touches like the piano that literally shows up for 2 bars & disappears again.
After I spun the album several times, "My Iron Lung" supplanted "Just" as my favorite track on it, & it sounds so forward-thinking that I was interested to learn it predated the album by 6 months, 1st appearing on its namesake EP with a bunch of B-sides that are well worth anybody's time. The song's massive, chaotic chorus anticipated the atonal crunch of "Paranoid Android," & its lyrics dialed in the prickly art-rock attitude Radiohead would continue to affect for the next decade or so.
Sometimes I feel like apologizing to albums like this: if I don't play you as much, it's not because I don't like you. It's because I know you so well that all I have to do is close my eyes to hear you.
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