if this journal wasn't just me ranting about music.

I've had a really boring thanksgiving break. Nothing has happened, all of my friends have been busy, most of my time has been spent watching college football at my grandparents. Electric bass-wise I'm at this irritating stage where I can sit down and doodle for half an hour and like it enough to trick myself into thinking I don't need to practice that day and upright bass-wise I feel like I don't have a lot of material and what I do want to play I can handle on electric but not on upright. So its been frustrating. I've listened to The Stage Names so much that the first track kinda just sails past my consciousness and I forget its happening. My space bar is broken so I have to hit it really hard. It kinda slows things down.

Whatever. The real reason I'm writing this is cos I came up with something interesting to say about music again. I've been in a slump since that killer "Hazards of Love" review. This isn't a review or anything, its really just a statement. Its a statement about the Radiohead album The Bends. I know what you're thinking, "another person jacking off to Radiohead", but thats really not what this is. Rather than writing a thousand different things that it isn't I think I'll just go ahead and show it to you.

You know when you're really tired and the room is just silent and someone says something and the words just seem to hang in the air? They feel like they're hitting a different part of your ear. I find this to be an optimal time to listen to music critically, as it forces me to hear the little nuances that make the album what it is. For instance, it struck me tonight while I was riding in my dad's car listening to "The Bends" that Thom Yorke spends much of the album not really singing but rather defeatedly stating. I don't mean this to be a rant about "the under appreciated radiohead album that solidified their place in the 90's music scene and set the tone for their future masterpieces." I would find it highly ironic to place the tag of "under rated" on one of the most overblown bands in todays music. Nevertheless, I think all Radiohead "scholars" (myself included) have a tendency to gloss over the Bends. It is not, we all agree, as good as OK Computer. It is not, we all agree, as bad as Pablo Honey. It is forever caught in the middle. It retains negatives from the previous and shows signs of life that led to the next album. Ask most Radiohead fans what they think of The Bends and you'll likely get a two to three sentence response and a fade into a rant about the genius of Kid A.

The real issue with The Bends is that it is the crazy uncle of the Radiohead discography. It's strengths completely negate its weaknesses and its weaknesses completely negate the strengths. The album manages to be completely bland in retrospect. You hear Thom at someone of his best (My Iron Lung) and some of his worst (Black Star, Nice Dream). Colin gets to flex his bass chops and the three guitar attack is in full force, yet Thom, Jonny and Ed never tap the full potential of that lineup like they do with "Paranoid Android". Thom's lyrics are certainly an accurate depiction of his state of mind but still straddle the dangerous line between generic and subtly special. Although "Street Spirit" is an amazing track by the time you get to it you've been forced to wade through enough banalities to make the album seem another display of angsty pop rock.

The real reason no one seems to want to talk about The Bends is because they're avoiding the ugly truth about the album (and simultaneously the ugly truth about Radiohead fans). If another band came along in this day and age and followed, step for step, Radiohead's career arc the so called "since the beginning, die hard radiohead fans" would have dropped that band like a sack of bricks once they released their "The Bends".

People are okay with admitting that Pablo Honey was bad and they always make a clear distinction between Pablo Honey era Radiohead and OK Computer era radiohead but they refuse to believe that any other Radiohead album could be less than great. And thats just what The Bends is. Good but not great.

When I try to rank an album in my mind I try to picture it in this day and age. And right here and right now I wouldn't pay very much attention at all to The Bends.

I dunno, just food for thought.