Peer to peer music file sharing had been going strong since the late 90s, but I personally didn’t have much interest in it.
For me, it was enough to convert CD tracks into mp3 files.
I had already been an avid music collector, but once computers took over the job of music storage, I became a Super Collector. Suddenly, it was possible to add any albums borrowed from friends to my own music library.
And in 2005, when I was studying abroad in Japan, I signed up for a membership at Tsutaya:
A chain store that rented music CDs as well as movies. This not only gave me a steady supply of new music files to rip and save, it gave me access to long sought-after albums that were not available in the US.
Try Bend the Rules
With all this music at my fingertips, why bother with a peer to peer sharing site like Napster or Kazaa? In my case, the answer was just one word, albeit a compound one:
Radiohead was one of my very favorite rock bands out there. I of course owned all of their albums.
(Well, I ripped Pablo Honey to my computer from a friend’s CD, but you understand)
And I learned the lyrics to many of their songs, partially thanks to fan archive sites like green plastic radiohead. However, upon perusing those online archives, I eventually became aware that Radiohead had a lot of other songs that had never made their albums.
They had been released as B-sides, or via EPs. Or just never officially released, but heard live.
I hadn’t bought any of Radiohead’s various single releases, because CD and cassette singles never interested me. It just seemed like a waste of plastic and shelf space to store two or three songs. And I guess they never interested my friends either.
So we all remained ignorant of the riches that Radiohead had made available to their most dedicated fanatics.
Peer to peer file sharing changed all that. It opened the floodgates to anyone interested enough to click the right buttons. I was in Tokyo when I finally decided to click those buttons and give file sharing a try.
Hunkered away in my dorm room one night, I downloaded LimeWire onto my laptop, and searched for available Radiohead files from the users online.
I soon got ahold of the Com Lag EP tracks, which had just been released the year before.
- I basked in the glories of the My Iron Lung EP, and all of the other B-sides from the Bends era.
- I stomped along to “Polyethylene.”
- Snarled along with “Pearly.”
- Rocked out to “Palo Alto.”
- Jammed to “Meeting in the Aisle.”
And I marveled how all of these OK Computer B-sides could have easily fit on the proper album
I also dug into some leaked tracks. Most of them featured abysmal sound quality, but the charm of the songs still shone through. When the band finally decided to officially release some of these tracks in 2017—such as “Man of War” and “Lift”– it was incredibly gratifying to hear them as they were intended to be heard. Nevertheless, I had been listening to those songs in some form or another for more than a decade thanks to LimeWire.
Some of the live tracks I had downloaded were of songs that eventually ended up on proper albums.
“The Present Tense” from A Moon Shaped Pool, and “Skirting on the Surface” from The Smile’s debut album.
I Can’t Pretend
But perhaps my most profound excavation came from the Kid A and Amnesiac years.
As I alluded to in my last AudioPhyles post, I don’t view these albums as equals in any way.
Kid A remains one of my very favorite albums ever. .
As much as I loved The Bends and OK Computer, I was fully onboard with the band’s evolution beyond their more standard foundations in anthemic rock.
Kid A promised a path of adventure, of unfettered free expression.
And anyway, fans who wanted rock histrionics could always go listen to Muse instead, right?
Amnesiac came just one year after Kid A, and featured songs from the same recording sessions. Yet this first sequel in Radiohead’s promising new creative phase was…a bit of a let-down. To be sure, there were some phenomenal songs on there. “Pyramid Song” remains one of the best in their canon. And who can resist the charms of “Knives Out” and “I Might Be Wrong?”
There were also songs that I didn’t really like at first that I’ve since grown to love.
I’d found “Packt Like Sardines In a Crushd Tin Box” to be rather bloodless as an opener, but I’ve come to see it as a great mood setter.
And while “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” will never be among my favorite Radiohead tracks, I’ve warmed to it considerably.
My impression of Amnesiac was that it just felt slight compared to Kid A. It came off more like a glorified EP than the next chapter from the greatest band on earth.
I offered cautious praise like a dutiful fan, but in my heart of hearts I was disappointed that my heroes had missed the mark.
Yet I wouldn’t register the extent of my disappointment with Amnesiac until I started mining LimeWire for B-sides from this era. Listening to these songs, it became clear that they not only stood up to the album tracks, their inclusion would have strengthened the album!
There is a grim severity to Amnesiac that is unlike any of Radiohead’s previous albums. I respect that the band was going for a certain mood, and they really went for it. But I think they took their idea too far. Instead of feeling powerful, some of the album’s darkest moments instead feel dour.
Brittle.
Joyless.
If they had included tracks like “Worrywort,” “Fog,” or “Trans-Atlantic Drawl,” they could have provided some contrast, some breathing room, and some more human touches to the affair.
Choose How It Ends
And then there’s the track “Cuttooth:” I was over the moon when I heard this song.
Centered on slow repetitions of a simple piano melody, the song steadily builds in volume and power. Thom Yorke sings the verses quietly, but with a seething intensity that I’d never heard from him.
He eventually breaks into his quivering falsetto, and then builds to dramatic wails as the band brings on the apocalypse.
Spare, spartan, severe, and relentlessly grim, this B-side nevertheless gave me things that I hadn’t realized that I had been craving. Emotional intensity. Drama. Wildness. Catharsis. Release.
It was great to know that Radiohead could still provide those things. But why did they cut this quality from their proper album?
Thankfully, the band did bring more drama and swagger in subsequent albums. At least once in a while.
- See the killer intro track “2 + 2 = 5,” or “Jigsaw Falling into Place.”
- Or in Thom and Johnny’s side project The Smile, the rip-roaring post punk of “You Will Never Work In Television Again.”
But what about Amnesiac?
Given the wealth of great material released around the same time, surely the official track list need not be the end all be all of how we experience the album?
As I already indicated last time, I decided to take the matter into my own hands. Or, at least my own computer music library. (Done with a mouse and a keyboard. Which were in my own hands. You get it.)
I took out Amnesiac’s most dour tracks, fiddled around with the track order, and added a few B-sides to liven things up a bit. Including “Cuttooth” as the dramatic closer.
Questions Here to Stay
Right before submitting my last AudioPhyles post, I made some Spotify playlists of my modified albums so readers can easily check them out.
And then…something strange happened. I searched for “Cuttooth” to close my Amnesiac playlist, and when I saw it pop up in the search results, I clicked on the track to play it.
And…it was not the song I knew. Nothing like it, in fact!
Don’t get me wrong, this song was great, but it was a steady propulsive track, rousing and hazy all at once. It almost sounded like some of the tracks that Radiohead had made in 2007 on In Rainbows. But where was the spare piano? The simmering intensity? The explosive drama? Where the heck did my song go? And why was this one also called “Cuttooth?”
Well, I did some searching, and I stumbled upon a blog written by someone who described a very similar scenario of discovering this quietly menacing “Cuttooth” song…only to eventually learn that the song was not named “Cuttooth.”
Moreover, it was not written or performed by Radiohead.
The song was actually called “Con-science.” And it was released in 1999.
By Muse.
You know:
That band that I had earlier dismissed as churning out easy rock drama.
It had only been a week prior that I had solved a 20-year-old mystery. An elusive song I swore was by Leonard Cohen turned out to be by song by Crime and the City Solution. Albeit one very much indebted to the style of Leonard Cohen.
Now, I’ve just revealed a 20-year-old mix-up. A song I’ve thought all along as a Radiohead song, an important B-side for the Amnesiac era, is in fact a Muse song. A B-side to their single “Muscle Museum.”
I’m still reeling from the revelation, truth be told. My feeling of certainty for this one thing has been completely upended, so there are still shocks to deal with.
But even I can’t miss the irony that Muse, a band frequently dismissed by hipsters as a Bends-era Radiohead clone, recorded a dark and arty song that—actually gave me what I felt that Amnesiac had been missing.
Touché, anonymous Muse fan feeding mistitled songs to LimeWire and other services.
Absolutely diabolical little trick you pulled off. But very well played.
Humble pie has been served.
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I remember Limewire. Good times.
Muse had some total bangers. I never had a problem with a band that sounded like a more accessible Radiohead until they got a little too accessible.
Pearl Jam left some of their better songs off of their albums because Vedder didn’t want to come off as pandering or too commercial.
Maybe Radiohead was thinking similarly.
Radiohead were definitely avoiding songs that sounded like their earlier era for their Kid A and Amnesiac track lists (for those who don’t already know, these two albums were culled from the same sessions). It makes sense that a song like “Follow Me Around” was left off, because it almost sounds like something from The Bends.
But most of the songs left off weren’t really commercial, they lacked traditional verse/chorus/verse structures. And most of them showcased adventurous arrangements or at least heavy electronic noodling. And let’s not forget that I adore Kid A, which was not commercial in sound (despite selling really well).
I can’t say for sure what they were going for with Amnesiac, but my guess is that they wanted to lean hard into a depressive mood. Which is fine, but it’s not the album I would have assembled given the songs they had to choose from.
As for Muse, I probably only heard one or two songs of theirs in my Tower Records days. And I was still young at that time, young enough to puritanically judge anyone who sounded vaguely similar as irredeemable copycat poseurs. Silly stuff.
Obviously, if I had been more familiar with Muse’s songs, I would have readily recognized the vocals in my fake “Cuttooth” track as Matt Bellamy rather than Thom Yorke.
Instead, I simply assumed that Thom was trying out a unique approach to his vocals for that song. Whoops!
My dad was a big Napster user. He used it to find old, out-of-print Perry Como records that weren’t available any other way.
I love this story.
The lovely Ms. Virgindog loves ka-chunk in “Creep” but can’t stand Radiohead otherwise. They’re not heavy enough for her and she doesn’t care for the “arty” music I listen to.
I really should like Radiohead and Muse more than I do. They’re great, creative, inventive musicians but the results wear thin for me. I have a lot of their stuff (In part because a record collecting friend sent me a hard drive with nearly a terabyte of music) but I don’t select them when I’m looking for something to listen to. I think it’s the vocals that put me off. Falsetto gets old quick.
Going by my memory of last listening to them, I hate to say it but I think Pablo Honey is my favorite Radiohead album. It doesn’t try as hard as the others and feels more natural.
Thanks for this, Phylum. I may give them another chance. I appreciate their work, it’s just not my cup of black coffee.
They can be a good cup of black coffee for a blue morning, when the toast is burning and the rain keeps falling. Wait a minute, that’s Lacy J. Dalton.
Yeah, if you don’t like the try-hard adventurousness and also don’t love the falsetto, I guess Pablo Honey is where you’d probably fall. The Bends is a stronger album that doesn’t get too arty, but it’s quite falsetto-heavy.
Still, you might want to check out an album like In Rainbows if you haven’t heard it. It’s almost like their version of yacht rock. There’s some darkness, and some unconventional playing, but the songs are fairly simple, and mostly kind of laid back and nice. In that context, maybe Thom’s falsetto sounds more natural, since it’s not trying to be “rock” in a conventional sense. I dunno.
Or maybe just stick with their Bond covers. Nobody does them better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGByJMB300s
You’re right about In Rainbows. I liked it the could of times I listened to it but wasn’t moved to seek it out again. Listening to the Bond cover confirms that it’s his voice that grates on me. Can’t love ’em all, I guess, but it does inspire me to go listen to some Carly Simon. 🙂
Well, there’s always the few songs where he hides or distorts his voice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXNbfU0Ww_E
Agree that Kid A > Amnesiac.
I never tried file sharing. Probably would have saved me a lot of money, though it was in the 90s that I was buying all those Radiohead (and everyone else) CD singles for the extra tracks. I bought Com Lag in the 00s mainly so I could have Fog.
I really didn’t like Muse when they first came out. Don’t know if it was imitation being the worst form of musicality. Took until the Black Holes And Revelations album to finally appreciate them. Though that didn’t extend to going backwards and rediscovering the earlier stuff. That still leaves me cold.
Tenuous celebrity connections. Think I’ve said before that in the mid 90s Thom Yorke stood behind me in the queue in WH Smiths news stand in London Victoria Train Station.
Got an even duller Muse connection. The uncle of bass player; Chris Wolstenholme worked with my wife for many years.
Anecdotal gold right there.
Com Lag has a great live recording of “Fog,” but my favorite version is on the B-side of the “Knives Out” single.
I don’t really have any interesting musical connections. Except that I rang up Poogie from the Delfonics when working at Tower Records.
You know, looking at the Com Lag cover art, I can’t help but wonder if the use of Japanese script for the title is to make a dirty joke, as it is rendered into katakana as komu ragu.
#DeepThoughts
I always feel bad because of my huge blind spot for Radiohead. I doubt that I would love them overall, but in all of their material I’m sure there’s a few songs just for me that i would love.
I will confess that I watched Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and the acoustic version of “Creep” played. I thought the song was so bad that I looked it up and found out the name/artist and was surprised. I’m sure they have way better songs. 🙂
Oh…but edited to say that I loved your story of finding out the song was by Muse!
I remember you saying that you tend not to like minor key melancholy, so there’s a fair amount of Radiohead that would rub you the wrong way.
Thom Yorke kind of turned it into a trick in a recent song.
It starts out dark and wintry (using maybe a chromatic scale), then suddenly opens up into an inviting laid back soul sound. Then switches back and forth.
Despite being a cohesive song, it’s like turning the heat on and off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKXQhFXlFs4