Going away for a festival in a week so the updates to my blog will become less frequent sometime soon.
The Bends is one of Radiohead's first albums, and one of their most straightforward. It's the followup to the debut, Pablo Honey, a record which isn't very favored amongst the bigger fans of the band and The Bends is their first real success, which however would be followed up by OK Computer, the number one album on this chart.
My personal issue with The Bends is that the record comes of as incredibly cheesy and forced. It is 90's alt-rock, a genre that I have a lot of issues with personally, which is my similar issue with The Bends. It all feels built upon reaching a climactic chorus, where the vocalist can belch out some "touching" poetry over cools riffs and monotone drums. The Bends is a huge culprit in homogenity; it doesn't try to move away from the formula that's apparent on almost all of the tracks on the album, bar a few exceptions, the album's strongest suites.
While there is a charm to tracks like High And Dry or Fake Plastic Trees, they mainly come of as generic run of the mill examples of similar songs from the bands contemporaries. The only really admirable thing about them is Yorke's falsetto which shines a different light on the kind of songs that you can find on any radio station that plays brittish rock from the 90's.
I guess it just doesn't feel classy or eloquent. It doesn't feel like there went any effort into standing out and making something unique with this record, something I think Radiohead tried a lot harder to achieve for the years to come after The Bends. But the fact still stands that this is a record that I don't like a lot. One of the one's I consider the weakest of the bunch on this list.
The Bends
Radiohead
3.5/10
Anton Öberg Sysojev
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