Albums That Changed Music: Radiohead - The Bends

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In its pursuit of intelligent, imaginative, inspired music, Radiohead won six Grammy Awards, sold 30 million albums, and was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. Today, Radiohead continues to be admired as one of the few bands that continues to innovate and renew itself. It almost single-handedly has kept rock relevant in the 21st century, when the genre has largely gone out of fashion.

Radiohead’s stellar reputation is to a large degree based on the band’s most famous albums, their third, OK Computer (1997) and their fourth, Kid A (2000), both of which won a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album. It is less well-known in the US that it was in fact the band’s second album, The Bends, released in 1995, that launched Radiohead’s experimental side and established their ambitious new musical direction.

The Bends was Radiohead’s Big Leap Forwards into unknown musical territory, and also distinguished them from the Britpop movement. The song writing is incredibly strong throughout and is enhanced by striking arrangements, extraordinary sonic landscapes, and a majestic production, courtesy of producer John Leckie. The Bends is Ground Zero for what has been called “the Radiohead aesthetic.”

The Bends was released on March 13, 1995 in the UK, on Parlophone Records, and on April 4 in the US, on Capital Records. Featuring artwork by Stanley Donwood, it was immediately successful in their homeland, spending 160 weeks in the UK album charts and reaching to number 4, but it was much less recognized in the US.

The reviews in the UK also were overwhelmingly positive, with The Guardian writing that Radiohead had “transformed themselves from nondescript guitar-beaters to potential arena-fillers.” Q magazine called the album a “powerful, bruised, majestically desperate record of frighteningly good songs.” And the New Musical Express praised it as “a classic” and “the consummate, all-encompassing, continent-straddling ’90s rock record.”

The Bends put Radiohead on course to become the biggest and most influential rock act in the world. The band itself recognized the album as a “turning point” in their career, and were aware that it had an immediate impact on their contemporaries.

The legacy of The Bends continues to shine. In 2006, it was included in a list of “50 albums that changed music,” that was published in the prestigious British newspaper The Observer. Today, twenty-six years after its release, many regard it as Radiohead’s magnum opus.

A review in Allmusic concludes, “What makes The Bends so remarkable is that it marries such ambitious, and often challenging, instrumental soundscapes to songs that are at their cores hauntingly melodic and accessible. With The Bends, Radiohead have reinvented anthemic rock.”

© 2021, Paul Tingen

www.tingen.org

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