Pablo Honey.
This started out as a message board post, in a thread entitled "Defend a band's 'worst' album", but I decided that I wanted to post it here, because I just feel this strongly about Radiohead's much maligned debut album. So here you go.
Radiohead - "Pablo Honey": OK, first of all, no matter how overplayed it is, "Creep" is a really good song. Simple, yes, but so's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", and that CHUNKA! CHUNKA! guitar thing right before the choruses is incredibly intense. We've all heard it so many times that the impact is dulled, but if that song didn't knock you out the first time you heard it, I'll buy you a taco. I'll give you that "Thinking About You" and "How Do You" are pretty trite and average, and that "Stop Whispering" goes on a touch too long, but the latter is a pretty great example of that intensely emotional English guitar ballad that bands like Catherine Wheel were really good at, and it's from track 6 on that this album really roars. First, "Anyone Can Play Guitar", which is a raveup anthem of epic proportions (as proven by this blistering performance from MTV in 1992), then one awesome jam after another until the end of the album. "Ripcord", "Vegetable", "Prove Yourself" and "I Can't" are all great melodic-verse/crunch-chorus rockers with the sort of tortured, emotional lyrics that really hit home for me as a teenager, such as when Thom Yorke screams "I will not control myself!" on "Vegetable"s chorus, or his plea at the end of "I Can't"s second verse--"If you give up on me now, I'll be gutted like I've never been before." Classic stuff that still affects me even now. The quieter "Lurgee" and epic closer "Blow Out" finish the record in fine fashion, and honestly, by the time I get to that point, I've completely forgotten that half of the first side was weak. The album could have been better if some of those tracks were replaced with superior non-LP B-sides of the era, such as "Faithless The Wonder Boy" (which I got by purchasing the "Creep" cassette single--a worthy investment), but as it is, I still prefer it to anything they've done since "OK Computer".
Radiohead - "Pablo Honey": OK, first of all, no matter how overplayed it is, "Creep" is a really good song. Simple, yes, but so's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", and that CHUNKA! CHUNKA! guitar thing right before the choruses is incredibly intense. We've all heard it so many times that the impact is dulled, but if that song didn't knock you out the first time you heard it, I'll buy you a taco. I'll give you that "Thinking About You" and "How Do You" are pretty trite and average, and that "Stop Whispering" goes on a touch too long, but the latter is a pretty great example of that intensely emotional English guitar ballad that bands like Catherine Wheel were really good at, and it's from track 6 on that this album really roars. First, "Anyone Can Play Guitar", which is a raveup anthem of epic proportions (as proven by this blistering performance from MTV in 1992), then one awesome jam after another until the end of the album. "Ripcord", "Vegetable", "Prove Yourself" and "I Can't" are all great melodic-verse/crunch-chorus rockers with the sort of tortured, emotional lyrics that really hit home for me as a teenager, such as when Thom Yorke screams "I will not control myself!" on "Vegetable"s chorus, or his plea at the end of "I Can't"s second verse--"If you give up on me now, I'll be gutted like I've never been before." Classic stuff that still affects me even now. The quieter "Lurgee" and epic closer "Blow Out" finish the record in fine fashion, and honestly, by the time I get to that point, I've completely forgotten that half of the first side was weak. The album could have been better if some of those tracks were replaced with superior non-LP B-sides of the era, such as "Faithless The Wonder Boy" (which I got by purchasing the "Creep" cassette single--a worthy investment), but as it is, I still prefer it to anything they've done since "OK Computer".
Labels: Music
posted by Andrew TSKS at 4:27 PM
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