AM Radiohead3 Out of 5 Stars
Before Thom Yorke decided he hated the world and began writing about it, Radiohead debuted with modest rock and roll album in 1993. Granted, it is easy to see that these guys were art-school rockers with some ambition, but the bulk of "Pablo Honey
" mixes punky, Replacements like
thrashing with the them coming to prominence of grunge. It's an
otherwise inauspicious debut, the dawn of a band.
That is, except for the hit. "Creep" played off the soft-loud-soft-loud grunge blueprint with a heaping dose of pre-hipster self-loathing irony and managed to become a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. "You're so f---ing special," moans Yorke as guitarist Johnny Greenwood's stabbing cracks the docile surface, "I wish I were special, but I'm a Creep." Despite the fact the the band soon came to loathe the song (on The Bends
they slag the success of their hit during "My Iron Lung
"), it did set
the tone for much of what Radiohead would develop as a band attitude
later.
That said, the rest of "Pablo Honey"
has a few gems to be found.
The more acoustic based "Thinking About You" is as plain a song as the
band's ever done. "Anyone Can Play Guitar" is pretty much a fun song,
and the time-workout of "You" is a lot more complicated than it sounds
at first blush. Given the incredible path Radiohead would blaze within
a few years, "Pablo Honey" shows a band working to find what eventually
would be a unique voice on the alternative rock pantheon.
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