AudioPhyles, Part 4: Retrograde Amnesia

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

AudioPhyles, Part 3: Blasphony

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. . 

Kid A promised a path of adventure, of unfettered free expression.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

By Muse.

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.”

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.

Absolutely diabolical little trick you pulled off. But very well played.

Humble pie has been served.

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