5 Out Of 5 Stars
While the first Radiohead album, Pablo Honey, was a decent go at the prevailing grunge sound of the time, The Bends was where Thom Yorke and company went from imitation to originality.Yorke's infatuation with modern alienation was focused and Jon Greenwood had fine tuned his guitar attacks into a voice that became unique to him and the band. More than any of their other albums, "The Bends" rocked hard and loud.
While the follow-up would find Yorke pushing his view more into the technology of alienation (and produce a masterwork in OK Computer), "The Bends" was still a human album. As "High and Dry" made it clear:
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"Drying up in conversation, You'll be the one that cannot talk.
All your insides fall to pieces, you just sit there wishing
you could still make love."
That may be the most aching lyric to come off Yorke's pen, and it's followed by yet another bit of brilliance, "Fake Plastic Trees." I always though the line "that she bought from a rubber man in a town full of rubber plans" was a nod to The Beatles in Radiohead's own twisted world. Then there's the band looking at the flukish success of "Creep" on "My Iron Lung," where the sudden recognition of that one song becomes the twin blessing and curse of rock hit and novelty...and insecurity of creative doubt takes root.
While Yorke was already pushing Radiohead up and away from the typical rock forms of the day, "The Bends" remains the band's most rocking and accessible CD. The seeds of artistic explosion had already reached a fertile stage and would jump the tracks on the next two albums, yet to my ears, "The Bends" was Radiohead's first perfect record.
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