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| Track List: 1. Airbag 2. Pearly 3. Meeting In The Aisle 4. A Reminder 5. Polyethylene [Parts 1 & 2] 6. Melatonin 7. Palo Alto Running time: 25 minutes Released: 1998 |
Radiohead. Polarising, less relevant than they once were. I picked up this EP long after it came out, well after they had left this era behind. Honestly, Airbag is pretty much the only song title I recognise. Lets see what it is like with a modern sensibility.
Airbag itself remains a striking opener. I find I like the body of the song less than the intro these days but that screeching as it exits the speakers for the first time is a solid impact, and whenever the refrain returns it feels like a better piece of music, but that is less frequent than my memory would have had. I find myself glad when it ends as I am no longer ruining my young adulthood by tearing up memories.
The album cover says this release was aimed at the US. Pearly makes that feel like it may be a musical aim as well as a commercial one based on perceived preferences. It feels bland, guitars on dull rock settings, and Yorke's voice stretched thin over it. There is none of ... something I want to associate with this era of Radiohead but cannot quite put my finger on. My failing there, but yeah; so far this is lacking and Meeting in the Aisle does nothing to disabuse me of that notion. Had I heard it blind, there is no way I would attribute it to Radiohead in a million guesses. Maybe it hints a little bit at the Kid A path taken after OK Computer (the real contemporary of this EP) but even that is a stretch.
A Reminder does not have an obvious Radiohead stamp on until the vocal starts, but there is something about this slow, sparse track that captured my attention as soon as it began. Really hard to identify what it is or why* but the soundscape of this track is really successful at creating an atmosphere, and a sense of something building. I am left disappointed though, it never crescendos and instead ends abruptly: it feels like a waste.
Polyethylene. This song sounds familiar now that I hear it again, but not in a way that does anything for me. It leaves me cold in a similar fashion to Pearly, whilst Melatonin turns me off by being too synthy. This really is an in-between release - neither one thing nor the other and it suffers for it. Palo Alto closes the disc and it has something intangible about it, like A Reminder, but I am left on the fence and feeling as though it does not quite come together right. Like the whole EP - it has elements of the guitar rock they began with and the more experimental edge that they took later (though a lot more of the former) and to me it feels caught between the two. Not melodic enough to work as one, and nothing like as balls-out electronic as it would need to be to work as the other.
I am faced with the impression that either this was just a bad selection of tunes that are neither one thing nor the other or my current tastes have found me migrating away from the Radiohead of the late 90s. I loved OK Computer and I actually always really liked Kid A (The National Anthem is awesome, and the segue from Optimistic to In Limbo was one of my favourite transitions at the time). It will be a while before I get that far to see how I find them holding up, but I did hear Black Star (from The Bends) more recently, and I did still love that. The wider catalogue will have to wait and see.
*I guess at the end of the day, that is true for a lot of our musical preferences
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