THE BENDS

Breaking the one hit wonder rumor, Radiohead releases this powerful album, although, in the prog scope, they're not quite there yet. Other Radiohead albums such as Ok Computer and Kid A can certainly claim to be more progressive, but this album definately is a high point in their career. After finally deciding to give this album a shot, I realized that I'd heard most of the songs before on local radio. This is for a reason, as most of the songs are very radio-fiendly and very memorable. All in all, this is definately a song-based album.

There area couple of increadible rock songs here, but not too much prog content. THE BENDS and JUST are two great songs that deserve all the attention they get, and FAKE PLASTIC TREES and (NICE DREAM) are also great, if a bit slower. A couple songs that do present the prog road the band would eventually take are MY IRON LUNG and STREET SPIRIT, while the rest are good, but not entirely worth mentioning. What would have made this album a lot more respectable and accessable (albiet, they hadn't taken this road yet, and still haven't really) for the prog community would have been some longer songs, but the content and instumentation definately give off a good post-prog sound.

This album's rating is hard to come up with, but ultimately it recieves 3 stars as a prog album, it's got a lot of good songs on it, and it's a good "song" album, but prog is usually about the "album" albums. As a rock album it recieves 4.5 stars, it's unmissable as a 90s rock album, definately. Later albums would definately prove Radiohead as the prog band they are, this was simply the first step.

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