Track By Track: Amnesiac

Jesse Paller

“Track By Track‰” is a biweekly feature that picks a great album every two weeks and briefly gushes about each song on it in order. Dedicated to the experience of listening to and loving an entire album rather than a few standout tracks, because when a band has created a truly great album, they have succeeded as artists.

My first pick is Radiohead‰’s Amnesiac (2001, Parlophone). While pretty much every Radiohead album (maybe not Pablo Honey) qualifies as a great album and well deserving of a track-by-track review, Amnesiac contains the greatest stylistic variety in a single package of any of their albums. Records such as OK Computer, In Rainbows and Amnesiac‰’s richly atmospheric older brother, Kid A, represent perfect expressions of a certain sound. Amnesiac includes highlights of nearly every different aspect of Radiohead‰’s multifaceted musical personality; beautiful guitar clusters, skittering electronics, string and horn arrangements, sonic experimentation, straight-ahead ballads, irresistible grooves and of course Thom Yorke‰’s singular vocals are all present throughout this darkly jazzy collection of songs.

1.“Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box”

To introduce the album, a cold, metallic drum sample is combined with minimalistic electronic percussion and contrasted by a simple, warm synth loop, while Thom sings lyrics of disaffection. Endless layers of electronic trickery fill the stereo space. Altered and reversed vocal and guitar samples pile up with an eerie reverb behind it all, as the song form and lyrics enter and leave at will.

2.“Pyramid Song”

A desolate, descending piano requiem in an impossible time signature drifts through a vast landscape of violins and vocal reverb, as mystical lyrics paint a picture of worlds beyond. The drums hit, with swinging cymbals and snare contextualizing the jazzy rhythm. As the song climaxes, Thom‰’s vocals move from falsetto to belting and a gigantic chorus of strings. Guitar backmasking and other worldly electronic instruments launch the song straight into the cosmos that its lyrics paint, bringing each piano chord down with crushing force as spaceships fly overhead.

3.“Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors”

The follow up to “Pyramid Song”‘s sublimity is nearly industrial, with a clicking and whirring rhythm that chugs through loops of sound. Vocals sounding like an alien describe different types of doors (some real, some not) over samples from the end of “Pyramid Song” with unnervingly random changes in sound space.

4.“You and Whose Army?”

A vintage warmth and calm dejection inhabits this song- a single guitar, gloomy chord progression, ‰50s vocal filter, fretless bass and three-part harmony characterize its first half. The second half is an explosion of drums, piano smashing and vocals that absolutely soar with the sinister lyrics repeated: “we ride tonight, ghost horses.‰Û

5.“I Might Be Wrong”

This song is dominated by the groove. A syncopated drumbeat, guitar mantra and deep bass stabs underlie Thom‰’s calm delivery in a moody minor key. It suddenly stops in the middle, making way for a plaintive guitar interlude. As the beat gradually reenters, the vocals bring out the chord progression‰’s beauty with falsetto and the song ends with a whisper.

6.“Knives Out”

This is Amnesiac‰’s most guitar-dominated (and gorgeous) song. It sounds like “Paranoid Android‰” from OK Computer took a dive into the Pacific Ocean. Layers upon layers of surfy guitar lines create a complete atmosphere of aquatic lushness. Thom‰’s lyrics belie the music‰’s splendor with lines about abandonment and cannibalism, adding a surreal element to the melancholy guitars.

7.“Morning Bell/Amnesiac”

The sluggish, heavily orchestrated “Morning Bell‰” serves as a fascinating looking glass, as if the original, a spare and electronic groove, had been sent back a century in time and emerged warped and depressed.

8.“Dollars And Cents”

“Dollars And Cents‰” takes a bass line strikingly similar to War‰’s “Low Rider‰” and sends it through a house of mirrors. The sound of the track shifts relentlessly, from string lines to close guitar, to vocal reverb and to synth cacophony providing the main atmosphere. Different verses and sections with lyrics vaguely referencing capitalism and urbanity build and fall, moving from beauty to dissonance in a schizophrenic approximation of modern life as the drums move from a quiet, Latin-esque groove to crashing fills.

9.“Hunting Bears”

The “Treefingers‰” of Amnesiac. But where Kid A‰’s guitar-based interlude was so ambient and inoffensive that it sounded like a synth texture, “Hunting Bears‰” is raw and imposing. Rather than drift along, it stalks, with ambient noise manipulated to suck at the clattering guitar notes. An ominous bass line as the guitar line descends with surprising prettiness.

10.“Like Spinning Plates”

This is one of the most difficult songs on Amnesiac to understand, but it contains an alluring sense of deep, dark intensity. A backwards chordal motif is punctuated by heartrending strings and peripheral sounds like tuned wind. On an album where lyrics are often obscured or abstract, “Like Spinning Plates‰” is the winner in terms of its poetry. Lines like “I‰’m being cut to shreds‰” and “my body‰’s floating down a muddy river‰” contribute heavily to the sense of dread that characterizes this out-of-body experience of a song.

11.“Life in a Glasshouse”

And after all the dread, after all the electronic atmosphere and schizophrenia of Amnesiac, the final song is played by a traditional jazz band. The effect is about as comforting as a cellophane quilt. While the band plays pretty trills and fills on their clarinets and trombones, the relentless piano below them plays through a creepy chord progression and Thom‰’s lyrics ooze a sense of paranoia at the crumbling of society and a lack of trust in our own perception. When the final chorus enters, an orgy of brass punctuates the mournful chords and Thom nearly shouts over the clanging ecstasy, and your heart breaks with the strain. The paranoid closing lyrics are followed by a final blast from the band, until the closing piano chord fades away into breathtaking emptiness.