Amnesiac

Barnes & Noble

Billed as the more accessible bookend to the inscrutable but chart-topping Kid A, this compelling disc isn't exactly a paradigm of mainstream pop. Yes, guitars do rear their -- sometimes ugly, sometimes quite beautiful -- heads more often on Amnesiac, but the songs here are every bit as deep and provocative. Not that that's a bad thing, of course. Most of Amnesiac's songs are wrapped in claustrophobia-inducing effects (like the pitch-shifter applied to Thom Yorke's already otherworldly voice on "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors") or bracing, atonal blasts of noise (like the machine-shop blare that permeates "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box"). When they do surface, the guitars that were all but absent on Kid A emerge in uncharacteristic ways: "I Might Be Wrong," for instance, finds Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien locked in a down-and-dirty blues battle that suggests the Yardbirds -- as gene-spliced with Underworld. Similarly, "Pyramid Song" takes a relatively spare, piano-driven melody and surrounds it with strings that wrap ever tighter, accentuating the desperate tone of Yorke's vocal. The singer asserts himself a bit more strongly on this disc, rather than burying his plaints beneath the sonic waves. His tone, harried and paranoid, remains essentially unchanged, his frets and fears articulated with an anguished delivery that sounds more credible than ever. Exhausting, but unforgettable, stuff. David Sprague

All Music Guide

Faced with a deliberately difficult deviation into "experimentation," Radiohead and their record label promoted Kid A as just that -- a brave experiment, and that the next album, which was just around the corner, really, would be the "real" record, the one to satiate fans looking for the next OK Computer, or at least guitars. At the time, people bought the myth, especially since live favorites like "Knives Out" and "You and Whose Army?" were nowhere to be seen on Kid A. That, however, ignores a salient point -- Amnesiac, as the album came to be known, consists of recordings made during the Kid A sessions, so it essentially sounds the same. Since Radiohead designed Kid A as a self-consciously epochal, genre-shattering record, the songs that didn't make the cut were a little simpler, so it shouldn't be a surprise that Amnesiac plays like a streamlined version of Kid A, complete with blatant electronica moves and production that sacrifices songs for atmosphere. This, inevitably, will disappoint the legions awaiting another guitar-based record (that is, after all, what they were explicitly promised), but what were they expecting? This is an album recorded at the same time and Radiohead have a certain reputation to uphold. It would be easier to accept this if the record was better than it is. Where Kid A had shock on its side, along with an admirably dogged desire to not be conventional, Amnesiac often plays as a hodgepodge. True, it's a hodgepodge with amazing moments: the hypnotic sway of "Pyramid Song" and "You and Whose Army?," the swirling "I Might Be Wrong," "Knives Out," and the spectacular closer "Life in a Glasshouse," complete with a drunkenly swooning brass band. But, these are not moments that are markedly different than Kid A, which itself lost momentum as it sputtered to a close. And this is the main problem -- though it's nice for an artist to be generous and release two albums, these two records clearly derive from the same source and have the same flaws, which clearly would have been corrected if they had been consolidated into one record. Instead of revealing why the two records were separated, the appearance of Amnesiac makes the separation seem arbitrary -- there's no shift in tone, no shift in approach, and the division only makes the two records seem unfocused, even if the best of both records is quite stunning, proof positive that Radiohead are one of the best bands of their time. Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Blender

Nobody has ever made a record that sounds like this before. Eventually, they will. But Radiohead will have done it first. Douglas Wolk