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Discussion: CoS: Ranking Radiohead Albums
Member Since: 2/20/2012
Posts: 24,225
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CoS: Ranking Radiohead Albums
This will mostly go unnoticed, but it's a good article for fans of the band. I don't have time right now to read it all myself, but I love rankings like this. It's rather predictable until the end.
Consequence of Sound: Every Radiohead Album From Worst to Best
8. Pablo Honey (1993)
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As an alt-rock time capsule, Pablo Honey is solid, and had it been Radiohead’s only release, or even if the band had stuck to its drums-and-guitars formula for the rest of their career, we might even call it great. But when you listen to what came after it, the record just feels a little thin, a little one-note, a little laughable in its first-person melodrama. It’s not bad — it’s just not very interesting.
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7. The King of Limbs (2011)
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The King of Limbs is original, coherent, and quite lovely to listen to, but that’s true of almost every Radiohead album, and most of the others have the advantage of at least one tentpole single strong enough to open or close a music festival. To be fair, that wasn’t what the band was aiming for here, but I’d be willing to bet that no Radiohead fan’s favorite song is on TKOL — even Pablo Honey has “Creep”. Albums like Kid A or OK Computer contain all the spectacle of an exploding volcano while TKOL, at a brisk 37 minutes, is more like a long walk down a forest path. It’s a wonderful way to pass the time, but the memory is going to fade.
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6. Amnesiac (2001)
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Because it came out of the same sessions as Kid A, Amnesiac tends to sound detached. That, combined with its refusal to stay in one place, can make it hard to penetrate upon relistening. But once you view it in the proper thematic context, it becomes a bizarre kind of masterpiece. The band isn’t jumping from older art forms like blues and jazz to chilly electronic effects because they want to jostle the listener — they’re doing it to suit the time- and dimension-traveling nature of Yorke’s lyrics. Or is it the other way around?
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5. Hail to the Thief (2003)
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There’s no pretending Hail to the Thief’s 15-song tracklist doesn’t frighten listeners, casual or not. Even the band members themselves have admitted that. Yet its 56-minute runtime also allows the album to be rich with production, time signatures, and intellectual perfections. Slight electronic vocal distortion washes over Yorke’s voice on “Sit Down. Stand Up. (Snakes & Ladders.)” acts as a subtle hint at what’s to come: manic repetition and a cocaine-laced bassline where the rain, finally, drops. This is the type of rawness bands dream of creating. There are ties to their other records, too.
“Go to Sleep. (Little Man Being Erased.)” sounds like a B-side from The Bends due to its acoustic guitar overlay. “A Wolf at the Door. (It Girl. Rag Doll.)” is a Grimms’ fairytale ballad off Amnesiac. “Sail to the Moon. (Brush the Cobwebs Out of the Sky.)” was, at the time, a look at what was to come with In Rainbows. Like Stanley Donwood’s cover art — a collection of phrases drawn from roadside advertising in Los Angeles — Hail to the Thief is a pop record sparkling with twisted fears, electronic sampling, and satirical lyrics that bite. Years later, it still feels like it’s a genius moment somehow, as if by magic, captured on tape, where unbridled energy overrides the album’s daunting length.
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4. The Bends (1995)
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Radiohead is still just as sulky on The Bends as they are on Pablo Honey, but after two years of touring, they figured out how to channel that sulkiness into something more powerful in its diversity. All three guitarists (Greenwood, Yorke, and Ed O’Brien) learned that there are other ways to convey anger that doesn’t just involve turning up the volume; Yorke learned that as a lyricist, mystery can still have bite and be a lot more interesting to sift through than just plain whininess; and Radiohead’s fans learned that the band could still make good on alt-rock promises while making the listener think just a liiiittle bit more about the words.
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3. In Rainbows (2007)
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Whether they like it or not, Radiohead changed the game with In Rainbows in more ways than one. The album’s pay-what-you-want method gave birth to Bandcamp and dozens of other platforms, lighting a far bigger fire beneath the belly that was illegal downloading at the time. Distribution aside, In Rainbows is a physical album that goes from 0 to 100. Radiohead sweat out a rambunctious fever on only a few songs like “Bodysnatchers” (many more, like “Bangers & Mash”, were dumped on the bonus disc) in favor of slowing things down for the rest of the record without falling prey to the tropes usually associated with balladry. The airiness of the album is what gives the minute changes such empathetic motion. “Videotape”, one of its more subtle successes, drives this point home as the closer. In Rainbows sees Radiohead open themselves up emotionally without pushing themselves to redefine sound. Instead, they changed the economic side of the industry, creating a spacious album to soundtrack the highs and lows of that revolution as it unfolded — and continues to unfold to this day.
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2. OK Computer (1997)
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OK Computer was Radiohead’s most ambitious project to date, a funhouse mirror large enough to show the whole warped world. Here, Yorke is at his storytelling best, living right at the knuckle of satire and sentiment. The album was universally adored, a global hit, the kind of career-defining moment that would allow any band to tour successfully — and live comfortably — for years. Most of the time that would be a good thing, but for Radiohead, it came with its own set of problems. They had achieved mastery over their instruments and pushed their particular brand of guitar-driven rock as far as it could go. Later, they would push even further, taking their themes of alienation out into space and, in the process, alienating huge swathes of critics and fans. But for one album they managed to straddle the two worlds: the accessible rock’n’roll of their early years and the later wild experiments. For one glorious moment, they were everybody’s darling.
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1. Kid A (2000)
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Kid A has been called “frustrating,” “dull,” and “incomprehensible,” all by smart people, all of whom love music. Even fans who enjoy it could make a case for several other Radiohead albums at the top position, and they wouldn’t be wrong. Music isn’t sports; there’s no such thing as a clear winner, and our purpose in ranking the albums isn’t to settle debates, but to provoke them. The argument for OK Computer, the other record we debated for the top spot, is simple: The brilliance of the songwriting is only matched by the accessibility of the songs. Pick any track and play it for nearly anyone who enjoys rock music, and they will likely find something to appreciate. The same cannot be said for Kid A, and so the argument for Kid A is more complicated.
To start, there’s the matter of influence. Not just other bands who were influenced by Kid A (and they may be too numerous to count) but also Radiohead themselves, who, after they had explored the extreme edges of popular music, could never go back to what they’d been before. In doing so, they invented something like a new genre and created a template against which subsequent generations of genre-bending bands would be judged. There’s also the question of reputation or what could be called the “parody test”; if you were going to do a parody of a Radiohead song, what would it sound like? A send-up of Radiohead circa The Bends might be confusing for a number of contemporaneous rock bands, whereas Kid A is hard to miss.
Also worth considering is Radiohead’s behavior on tour: In recent years, their setlists have been fairly light on their pre-Kid A material. At a minimum, this seems to suggest that they don’t enjoy playing those songs as much as their more recent albums; it might imply that they no longer feel like the same band. But all of that aside, there’s the simple fact that Kid A sounds like nothing else, a marriage of rock ’n’ roll and abstract expressionism. With this album, Radiohead did to music what Pollock and Rothko did to paints, stripping away everything extraneous — all the context and characters and places and stories that had always seemed necessary for popular music and gave us something no less compelling for being abstract and all the more powerful for being pure.
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Member Since: 1/6/2014
Posts: 2,937
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Member Since: 8/7/2015
Posts: 24,463
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The Bends is still my personal favorite. 
Kid A is top 3 nonetheless.
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Member Since: 1/1/2014
Posts: 26,845
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I like In Rainbows better but I can't really judge because I haven't heard most of the albums in full. I should probably get on that.
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Member Since: 2/5/2014
Posts: 29,111
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Originally posted by Wicked
Amnesiac > Kid A
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Thank you.
I completely agree
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Member Since: 5/18/2012
Posts: 27,141
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I never got Kid A. i mean, aesthetically, i see the technical methodologies put into it, and i appreciate it for that. But I never got into any song from the album.
I can recite Ok Computer and In Rainbows from start to finish like a poem with every little production detail, but i still listen to Kid A like an outsider.
Remove Kid A from the list, and otherwise i agree with the order 
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Member Since: 2/5/2014
Posts: 29,111
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In terms of how I prefer them right now.
Amnesiac > OKC > The Bends > Kid A > In Rainbows > The King of Limbs > Hail To The Thief > Pablo Honey
The King of Limbs is a really consistent rhythmic album. Most of the immediate emphasis is on the texture and atmosphere of the songs, which don't really show for a couple listens, but are really rewarding when they do. It's a pretty solid album even though it's not very showy.
Hail To The Thief on the other hand is a bloated mess as far as Radiohead albums go.
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Member Since: 8/19/2013
Posts: 17,938
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Member Since: 8/7/2015
Posts: 897
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tbh i've only ever listened to OK Computer and Kid A... and right now I prefer Kid A I think...
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Member Since: 2/20/2012
Posts: 24,225
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Here's another one that put The King of Limbs below Pablo Honey:
http://www.wired.com/2016/05/radiohead-albums-ranked/
 Also ranked Kid A at #1.
Kid A really is special; it's so coherent and transcendent that there isn't much else similar to it. All of their other electronic-influenced albums (Amnesiac, King of Limbs) lack that special something that makes Kid A a unique experience.
I still have to give the edge to OK Computer, though. I'm pretty sure every song on that album has given me those pleasurable chills at least once; Paranoid Android, Exit Music, Let Down, Karma Police, and Climbing Up the Walls work especially well.  The only songs on Kid A that do that to me are How to Disappear and Motion Picture Soundtrack. 
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Member Since: 8/7/2015
Posts: 897
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Quote:
Originally posted by chilicheese01
Here's another one that put The King of Limbs below Pablo Honey:
http://www.wired.com/2016/05/radiohead-albums-ranked/
Also ranked Kid A at #1.
Kid A really is special; it's so coherent and transcendent that there isn't much else similar to it. All of their other electronic-influenced albums (Amnesiac, King of Limbs) lack that special something that makes Kid A a unique experience.
I still have to give the edge to OK Computer, though. I'm pretty sure every song on that album has given me those pleasurable chills at least once; Paranoid Android, Exit Music, Let Down, Karma Police, and Climbing Up the Walls work especially well. The only songs on Kid A that do that to me are How to Disappear and Motion Picture Soundtrack. |
Everything in its right place? the title track.. in limbo... all song that give me chills from Kid A. I'm like the opposite to you lol
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Member Since: 2/20/2012
Posts: 24,225
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Quote:
Originally posted by maddisonbutt
Everything in its right place? the title track.. in limbo... all song that give me chills from Kid A. I'm like the opposite to you lol
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Oh, the outro on In Limbo definitely does it for me sometimes... Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. I think I just prefer to sound of OK Computer; it's almost dystopian and has the right balance of guitars and electronics imo.
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Member Since: 12/15/2011
Posts: 4,771
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"...but I’d be willing to bet that no Radiohead fan’s favorite song is on TKOL — even Pablo Honey has “Creep”."
well, Creep isn't a fan's fave, it's more like the most remembered song by GP.
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Member Since: 8/19/2013
Posts: 6,090
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I would def put Kid A below In Rainbows and OK Computer, but those three are the Trinity (with the Bends being a close 4th...) - this band is perfect! 
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Member Since: 4/29/2012
Posts: 15,977
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Hail to the thief would definitely be in my Top 3 along with OKC and Kid A.
Those 3 are always rotating as my personal favorite record of theirs. The Bends is close behind as well.
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To be fair, that wasn’t what the band was aiming for here, but I’d be willing to bet that no Radiohead fan’s favorite song is on TKOL — even Pablo Honey has “Creep
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Codex and Bloom are worthy contenders for their best song!
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Member Since: 1/1/2014
Posts: 6,292
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pretty accurate
IMO it should be like this:
Kid grAmmy>OK Computer>In Rainbows>The Bends>Amnesiac>TKOL>HTTT>the other one.
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