It may be difficult to imagine now, but there was a time when Radiohead were just another guitar-driven rock band, known for a single most wrote off as a fluke hit that would doom them to bargain bin obscurity and endless VH1 one-hit wonder specials. Suffice it to say that during the recording of The Bends, Radiohead’s follow-up to debut album Pablo Honey, the pressure was on. And while The Bends is by no means the peak of Radiohead’s abilities or even a sign of where they would eventually go, it now stands as perhaps the absolute pinnacle of the mainstream alternative rock of the ’90s.
While compatriots like the Smashing Pumpkins and Weezer, in a sense, never grew out of their origins, instead constantly working the same formula until it was a sad approximation of what it once was, Radiohead arguably gave up on guitar-driven rock because, with The Bends, they had perfected the formula and there was simply nowhere else to take it. Led by now-classic singles like “Fake Plastic Trees” and “High and Dry,” The Bends announced to the world that Radiohead were a band destined for greatness rather than the nostalgia circuit. While none of its tracks would reach the top of the charts in the same way “Creep” had only a few years prior, The Bends is an album that suffered from none of the filler and loose ends that had weighed down Pablo Honey. Instead, it is a gloriously fluid, flawless work, lacking a weak moment or any obstacle to its perfectly paced momentum.
Opening with the noisy, moody “Planet Telex,” The Bends makes it immediately clear that the rather obvious songwriting the band had previously dealt in has been all but erased, swapped out for something sprawling and all-consuming. When the first chords of “The Bends” ring out after a cacophony of street voices, it’s impossible not to feel energized and propelled by the work unfolding. Even though for all intents and purposes “The Bends” is a straight-out, no-holds-barred rock song, something just feels different; the songs have a certain weight, making it clear that this is a band that matters, perhaps even the only one that matters. And things only escalate from there, culminating in the almost tragic beauty of album closer, “Street Spirit (Fade Out).” But these are things surely everyone knows by now; these are all obvious facts about an album by a band who have now come to define their generation, who have now changed the very way the business of music operates.
More surprising is how fantastic the toss-offs and B-sides collected on this deluxe edition of The Bends are. Much of the extra material collected here would define lesser bands’ careers, whether it’s the hazy wonder of “Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong” or the tense, driving “Permanent Daylight.” The material Radiohead crafted in the mid- and late ’90s both on and off their albums is, simply put, some of the most incredible work by any band of any generation. In some ways, the extra material is just as important as the album itself, a sort of secret history explaining how it is that the band managed to craft three certifiable classics in the span of half a decade, all three of which sound nothing alike, all three of which single-handedly changed the face of rock music forever. Specifically, “Talk Show Host” acts as a bridge between what the band would soon be doing on OK Computer and then following that, Kid A. With its ambient background textures and rhythms cribbed from the then-infant IDM scene Radiohead were so vigorously following, “Talk Show Host” is like Kid A with OK Computer’s snarling guitars. Conversely, “The Trickster” is in more ways than one a blueprint for OK Computer’s centerpiece, “Paranoid Android,” all chugging rhythms and battling guitars.
But The Bends and its surrounding material from the same era are more than just historical curiosities or maps to where the band would go. They’re outright classics, still as vital and important as the day they were released, still as capable of inspiring countless others.
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