Album Review – The Bends by Radiohead

Album Title: The Bends

Artist: Radiohead
Release Date: March 13, 1995

Planet Telex
The Bends
High and Dry
Fake Plastic Trees
Bones
(Nice Dream)
Just
My Iron Lung
Bullet Proof…I Wish I Was
Black Star
Sulk
Street Spirit (Fade Out)

All songs written by Radiohead

The Bends, which came out 18 years ago this month, was Radiohead’s second album and their first to be regarded as a classic. Though it didn’t chart particularly well in the US, it eventually went platinum there, and in the UK it was a big commercial success. In both countries it was widely praised by critics, and it remains very highly regarded to this day. Along with the band’s subsequent album, OK Computer, it often appears near the top of best album lists, placing alongside albums by the Beatles.

The Bends and OK Computer are, by a substantial margin, my favorite Radiohead albums, and between the two of them, while I would have to give OK Computer the edge in terms of inventiveness and creative variety, in many ways I prefer the relatively straight-forward songs (“relatively” being a key word here) on The Bends due to their greater accessibility. OK Computer is still much more accessible than the albums that followed it, but it is still noticeably more experimental, so the songs tend to be slightly less immediate. The Bends is probably an easier starting point for those unfamiliar with Radiohead’s music.

This isn’t to say that The Bends is a conventional rock album. Radiohead’s intense guitar-based music and Thom Yorke’s dark, enigmatic lyrics were very distinctive, though they have had many imitators in the years since the album’s release. Virtually every track is powerful, from the dramatic opener “Planet Telex” to the weird yet excellent closing track “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”. In between are rockers like the title track, “Just”, “My Iron Lung” and “Bones” and mid-tempo tracks like “Fake Plastic Trees”, “High and Dry” and “Black Star”, with the latter three in particular having some of the album’s strongest melodies. Yorke’s lyrics are anything but cheerful, but their gloom goes perfectly with the music and Yorke’s falsetto singing. The result is an album which for the most part deserves the critical acclaim it has received. There are other albums that I enjoy listening to more (it might not make my list of “desert island discs”, in part because if I were really stranded on a desert island I’d probably want something more cheerful), but it still finds its way into my player more often than 90% of my other CDs because it is one of the most consistently good albums of its decade.