Pablo Honey is universally regarded as Radiohead’s weakest album. It’s not. It’s their best, and it’s not close.
The album features intense, virtuosic playing and powerful, visceral singing — something which can be said of none of their other albums. The drumming is exceptional — pulverizing, reckless, ferocious. Johnny Greenwood cements his place here as one of alternative rock’s best guitarists — later albums show only occasional flashes of guitar wizardry from him, whereas his playing is exceptional on this album throughout. Perhaps most importantly, Thom Yorke never sings in the facile whine he developed starting on OK Computer — his performance is spectacular here.
The album features a pair of genuine masterpieces — not only Creep, a majestic paean to alienation and strangeness, but also Blow Out, perhaps the summit of the band’s entire career. The second half of this track is sheer chaos of symphonic proportions — slashing bass that recalls The Who, savage drumming, otherworldly guitar. This is the Radiohead song which is most likely to be remembered 1,000 years from now.
The rest of the album doesn’t fall far below those summits — witness the intense and powerful groove of Vegetable, the mesmerizing hypnosis of Lurgee, the mind-blowing guitar on I Can’t. This is a terrific album that’s completely devoid of weak material.
By their second album, a more timid approach already starts to take form — The Bends is undoubtedly a solid effort, but nothing on it comes close to Creep or Blow Out, and Yorke and the band just don’t reach the same level of intensity. OK Computer — though partially salvaged by Airbag, Paranoid Android, and perhaps Exit Music — is nonetheless a pathetic work. So-called highlights like Karma Police and No Surprises have all the excitement of supermarket Muzak. They are utterly spineless and yawn inducing.
Kid A perhaps does better by abandoning rock music entirely; it’s a well-done electronic piece but hardly a revolutionary magnum opus unless you’ve never heard ’90s techno before. It’s the existential depression exuded by the album that people gravitate to; not the music. Amnesiac could have been their experimental masterpiece if Yorke hadn’t been involved; his vocals have by this point become unlistenable. After the comparatively weak Hail To The Thief, Radiohead released the ultimate style-over-substance album: In Rainbows. There’s not a lot of real music on here — it’s predominantly just atmosphere. The album does nothing more than create a vague, mildly psychedelic feeling that the listener lets wash over them as they slightly nod their head. Which is what people want. If people wanted real music, they would listen to Pablo Honey.
The King of Limbs was actually superior to In Rainbows; but because it was half baked and not as lush and atmospheric as its predecessor, it was despised. A Moon Shaped Pool returned to the creativity of Blow Out on some of the tracks but was too inconsistent to rival Pablo Honey overall (witness, for example, the pathetic ballad True Love Waits).
Pablo Honey’s lack of respect brings up an interesting point: The masses are not only blinded by catchy, obnoxious pop (The Beatles and various current pop stars) but also music that appears to be deep or profound but in reality lacks creativity (much of the rest of Radiohead’s discography). Pablo Honey remains the high-water mark of Radiohead’s career and stands as one of the best albums of its era.
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Brett Abrahamsen is a lifelong connoisseur of the experimental and obscure. He is also a science fiction writer (and an amateur philosopher of sorts). He resides in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
