Amnesiac: Vinyl LP Radiohead

This second helping from the sessions that produced the preceding Kid A will probably strike close listeners as a bit more structured, though it’ll be difficult to determine whether that’s simply because the peregrinations of the last album have prepared them for the trips to the outer limits taken here. Those expecting a U2-like return to tuneful, anthemic guitar-rock will have their hopes dashed upon a rock of colourful electronic experimentation and moody, studio-enhanced madness. The piano-based Pyramid Song and the martian-gospel-choir ballad You and Whose Army? might placate verse-chorus-verse traditionalists slightly, but the sampler-in-a-trash-compactor Pulk / Pull Revolving Doors and the pointillistic ambience of Hunting Bears attest to Radiohead’s continued nonconformist tendencies. Amnesiac opens with the claustrophobic, synth-bedecked Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box and closes with the dixieland funeral march Life in a Glass House.

The ambient underpinnings and garbled vocals of Everything in its Right Place, and the instrumental Treefingers, the electronic beats of Idioteque, and Yorke’s processed voice on the title track will come as quite a shock to diehard ’70s rockers who spent the late ’90s deifying Radiohead as heirs to the Pink Floyd throne. But these touches work brilliantly, while the more organic elements, such as the jazzy horn section on The National Anthem, and the comparatively conservative arrangement (though there’s some unsettlingly atonal orchestration lurking here, too) of How to Disappear Completely provide a counterpoint to all this incipient modernism.