Amnesiac (album)

Radiohead and producer Nigel Godrich recorded Amnesiac during the same sessions as its predecessor, Kid A, released in October 2000.[2] The sessions took place from January 1999 to mid-2000 in Paris, Copenhagen, and in Radiohead's Oxfordshire studio.[3][4] Drummer Philip Selway said the sessions had "two frames of mind ... a tension between our old approach of all being in a room playing together and the other extreme of manufacturing music in the studio. I think Amnesiac comes out stronger in the band-arrangement way."[5]

Radiohead incorporated influences from electronic music, 20th-century classical music, jazz and krautrock, using synthesisers, ondes Martenot, drum machines, strings and brass.[2] The strings, arranged by guitarist Jonny Greenwood, were performed by the Orchestra of St John's and recorded in Dorchester Abbey, a 12th-century church close to Radiohead's studio.[6][5]

Jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton pictured in 2006. He and his band performed on "Life in a Glasshouse".

The sessions produced more than 20 finished tracks. Radiohead considered releasing them as a double album, but felt the material was too dense.[7] Singer Thom Yorke said Radiohead split the work into two albums because "they cancel each other out as overall finished things. They come from two different places, I think ... In some weird way I think Amnesiac gives another take on Kid A, a form of explanation."[8] The band stressed that they saw Amnesiac not as a collection of B-sides or Kid A outtakes but an album in its own right.[9]

The electronic track "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" was assembled from loops recorded in the OK Computer sessions,[10] including elements of another Radiohead song, "True Love Waits".[11] The band disabled the erase heads on the tape recorders so that the tape repeatedly recorded over itself, creating a "ghostly" loop.[10] They used the pitch-correcting software Auto-Tune to process Yorke's speech into melody; according to Yorke, the software "desperately tries to search for the music in your speech, and produces notes at random. If you've assigned it a key, you've got music."[2] Auto-Tune was also used to process Yorke's vocals on "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box", to create a "nasal, depersonalised sound".[2]

For "You And Whose Army?", Radiohead attempted to capture the "soft, warm, proto-doowop sound" of the 1940s harmony group the Ink Spots. They muffled microphones with eggboxes and used the ondes Martenot's resonating palme diffuseur loudspeaker to treat the vocals.[2] According to a diary kept by guitarist Ed O'Brien, "Knives Out" took 373 days to record, "a ridiculously long gestation period for any song".[3] It was influenced by the guitar work of Johnny Marr of the Smiths.[12] "Dollars and Cents" was edited down from an eleven-minute jam, using an editing approach inspired by krautrock band Can.[2] Bassist Colin Greenwood played a jazz record by Alice Coltrane over the recording, inspiring his brother, guitarist Jonny Greenwood, to write a "Coltrane-style" string arrangement.[13]

"Like Spinning Plates" was the result of Radiohead's attempt to record another song, "I Will", for which Yorke had programmed a synthesiser sequence he dismissed as "dodgy Kraftwerk".[14] Radiohead reversed the recording and used it to create a new song. Yorke said: "I was in another room, heard the vocal melody coming backwards, and thought, 'That's miles better than the right way round', then spent the rest of the night trying to learn the melody."[2] Yorke sang the lyrics backwards; this recording was in turn reversed, creating vocals with lyrics that sound reversed.[10] Radiohead recorded "I Will" in a new arrangement for their next album, Hail to the Thief (2003).[15]

Only the final track, "Life in a Glasshouse", was recorded after Kid A was released. In late 2000, Jonny Greenwood wrote to jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton to ask his band to play on the song, explaining that Radiohead were "a bit stuck".[1] Greenwood told Mojo: "We realised that we couldn't play jazz. You know, we've always been a band of great ambition with limited playing abilities."[16] Lyttelton agreed to help after his daughter showed him Radiohead's 1997 album OK Computer.[1] According to Lyttelton, Radiohead "didn't want it to sound like a slick studio production but a slightly exploratory thing of people playing as if they didn't have it all planned out in advance".[1] The song was recorded over a seven-hour session, and left Lyttelton exhausted: "I detected some sort of eye-rolling at the start of the session, as if to say we were miles apart. They went through quite a few nervous breakdowns during the course of it all, just through trying to explain to us all what they wanted."[1]

Amnesiac incorporates experimental rock,[18] electronica,[19] and alternative rock.[20] Colin Greenwood said it had "more traditional Radiohead-type songs together with more experimental, non-lyrical based instrumental-type stuff as well".[21]

The first track, "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box", is an electronic song built from loops.[10] "Pyramid Song" was inspired by the Charles Mingus song "Freedom",[22] with lyrics inspired by an exhibition of ancient Egyptian underworld art Yorke attended while the band was recording in Copenhagen[9] and ideas of cyclical time discussed by Stephen Hawking and Buddhism.[9]

Yorke said "You and Whose Army?" was "about someone who is elected into power by people and who then blatantly betrays them – just like Blair did".[22] "I Might Be Wrong" combines a "venomous" guitar riff with a "trance-like metallic beat". Colin Greenwood's bassline was inspired by Chic bassist Bernard Edwards.[22] The lyric "never look back" came from advice given to Yorke by his partner, Rachel Owen: "Be proud of what you've done. Don't look back and just carry on like nothing's happened. Just let the bad stuff go."[22] "Knives Out", described as the album's most conventional song,[23] features "drifting" guitar lines, "driving" percussion, a "wandering" bassline, "haunting" vocals and "eerie" lyrics.[24]

"Morning Bell/Amnesiac" is an alternative version of "Morning Bell" from Kid A. O'Brien said that Radiohead often record and abandon different versions of songs, but that this version was "strong enough to bear hearing again".[25] Yorke wrote that it was included "because it came from such a different place ... Because we only found it again by accident after having forgotten about it. Because it sounds like a recurring dream. It felt right."[26] Yorke said the lyrics for "Dollars and Cents" were "gibberish", but were inspired by the notion that "people are basically just pixels on a screen, unknowingly serving this higher power which is manipulative and destructive".[22]

Jonny Greenwood used the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument. Its resonating palme diffuseur loudspeaker (pictured centre) was used to treat the vocals on "You and Whose Army?".

"Hunting Bears" is a short instrumental on electric guitar and synthesiser.[27] "Life in a Glasshouse" features the Humphrey Lyttelton Band playing in the style of a New Orleans jazz funeral.[28] According to Lyttelton, the song starts with "ad-libbed, bluesy, minor-key meandering, then it gradually gets so that we're sort of playing real wild, primitive, New Orleans blues stuff".[1] The lyrics were inspired by a news story Yorke read of a celebrity's wife so harassed by paparazzi that she papered her house windows with their photographs.[22]

The Amnesiac artwork was created by Yorke and longtime Radiohead collaborator Stanley Donwood.[29] Donwood said it was inspired by "taking the train to London, getting lost and taking notes". Likening London to the mythological labyrinth, he saw the city as "an imaginary prison, a place where you can walk around and you are the Minotaur of London, we are all the monsters, we are all half-human, half-beast".[30] The cover depicts a weeping minotaur on the cover of a book.[30] Donwood scanned blank pages of old books and superimposed onto them photos of fireworks and Tokyo tower blocks, biro copies of Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons drawings, and lyrics and phrases printed by Yorke on a broken typewriter.[31]

Donwood also designed a special edition package with a hardback CD case in the style of a mislaid library book. He imagined that "someone made these pages in a book and it went into drawer in a desk and was forgotten about in the attic ... And visually and musically the album is about finding the book and opening the pages."[30] The special edition won a Grammy Award for Best Recording Package at the 44th Grammy Awards.[32]

Radiohead announced Amnesiac on their website in January 2001, three months after the release of Kid A.[33] After having released no singles from Kid A,[5] Radiohead released two from Amnesiac: "Pyramid Song" in May[34] and "Knives Out" in July,[35] backed by music videos.[5] "I Might Be Wrong" was also released as a radio-only single in June.[36]

In June 2001, Radiohead began the Amnesiac tour, incorporating their first North American tour in three years.[37] Recordings from the Kid A and Amnesiac tours are included on the EP I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings, released in November 2001.[27]

Amnesiac debuted at number two on the US Billboard 200 with sales of 231,000, surpassing Radiohead's 207,000 first-week sales of Kid A.[38] It was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of Japan for shipments of 100,000 copies across Japan.[39] By October 2008, Amnesiac had sold over 900,000 copies worldwide.[40] In July 2013, it was certified platinum in the UK, for sales of over 300,000.

Professional ratings

Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	75/100[41]
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[42]
Entertainment Weekly	C+[43]
The Guardian	[44]
Los Angeles Times	[45]
NME	8/10[46]
Pitchfork	9.0/10[47]
Q	[48]
Rolling Stone	[49]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[50]
Spin	7/10[51]

After Radiohead's previous album, Kid A, had divided listeners, many hoped Amnesiac would return to their earlier rock sound.[52][47] The Guardian titled its review "Relax: it's nothing like Kid A".[52] However, Rolling Stone saw the album as a further distancing from Radiohead's earlier, "Britpop-like" style,[49] and Pitchfork found that "Amnesiac is about as close to The Bends as Miss Cleo is to Jamaican".[47] Stylus critic Mike Powell wrote that although Amnesiac was "slightly more straightforward" than Kid A, it "solidified the postmillennial model of Radiohead: less songs and more atmosphere, more eclectic and electronic, more paranoid, more threatening, more sublime".[53]

Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times felt that Amnesiac, compared to Kid A, was "a richer, more engaging record, its austerity and troubled vision enriched by a rousing of the human spirit".[45] The Guardian named it "CD of the week".[52] Guardian critic Alex Petridis, who had disliked Kid A, felt Amnesiac was superior, writing that it "strikes a cunning and rewarding balance between experimentation and quality control. It's hardly easy to digest but nor is it impossible to swallow."[52] He criticised the electronic tracks "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" and "Like Spinning Plates" as self-indulgent, but praised the album's "haunting musical shifts and unconventional melodies".[52]

Several critics felt Amnesiac was less cohesive than Kid A. AllMusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote that it "often plays as a hodgepodge", and that the albums "clearly derive from the same source and have the same flaws ... the division only makes the two records seem unfocused, even if the best of both records is quite stunning".[42] Pitchfork wrote that "the questionable sequencing of Amnesiac does little to hush the argument that the record is merely a thinly veiled B-sides compilation", though its "highlights were undeniably worth the wait, and easily overcome its occasional patchiness".[47] Stylus critic Powell wrote that "it stands as an excellent disc", but was not as "exploratory or interesting" as Kid A.[53]

Reviewing the 2009 reissue, Pitchfork wrote: "More than Kid A – and maybe more than any other LP of its time – Amnesiac is the kickoff of a messy, rewarding era ... disconnected, self-aware, tense, eclectic, head-turning – an overload of good ideas inhibited by rules, restrictions, and conventional wisdom."[54]

After a period of being out of print on vinyl, EMI reissued a double LP of Amnesiac on 19 August 2008 along with Kid A, Hail to the Thief and OK Computer as part of the "From the Capitol Vaults" series.[70] On 31 August 2009, EMI reissued Amnesiac in a two-CD "Collector's Edition" and a "Special Collector's Edition" containing an additional DVD. The first CD contains the original studio album; the second CD collects B-sides from Amnesiac singles and live performances; the DVD contains music videos and a live television performance. Radiohead, who left EMI in 2007,[71] had no input into the reissue and the music was not remastered.[72] The "Collector's Editions" were discontinued after Radiohead's back catalogue was transferred to XL Recordings in 2016.[73] In May 2016, XL reissued Radiohead's back catalogue on vinyl, including Amnesiac.[74]

All tracks are written by Radiohead (Colin Greenwood, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O'Brien, Philip Selway, Thom Yorke).

Notes

• "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" is titled "Pull/Pulk Revolving Doors" on Collector's Edition release.

Adapted from the Amnesiac liner notes.[75]

• Official Radiohead website
• Ed's Diary: Ed O'Brien's studio diary from Kid A / Amnesiac recording sessions, 1999–2000 (archived at Green Plastic)