The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Radiohead · Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, Colin Greenwood, Phil Selway · produced by John Leckie · Parlophone · twelve tracks, about 48 minutes
Mode
British guitar rock of the 1990s: three guitars voiced against one another under an exposed voice, between grunge and the art-rock album
Mythos
The body as apparatus: an iron lung, the diver’s bends, failing bones, a plastic tree, a spirit fading into the dark
Phase
Twelve songs; a blurred opening on a world already damaged, the lament at the fourth, the engine at the seventh, the argument with the band’s own hit at the eighth, a softer late run and a closing fade
Presentation
Album; twelve songs of about four minutes each, about forty-eight and a half minutes, every track sung, with no instrumental, segue or reprise
Register
A voice from near-whisper to full cry, with the break in it used as content; tremolo, chime and harmonics; acoustic guitar, strings and organ entering into the full band
Scale
One young man in a manufactured world, his body and his feeling under management, the city glimpsed in rows of houses
Governing Proposition
A band that had threatened to be remembered for one hit makes a second record of three guitars and a voice that breaks on purpose, and finds the subject that would carry it: a self in a world of manufactured goods and managed bodies, who comes to feel his own life as a fake and his own body as a failing machine. The record opens on a world already broken and ends in a fade, and between them it sets down a sound that the band’s later records, and by wide report much British guitar music, would take up.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record begins in a blur. Reverberating piano and a looped drum figure swirl together, the voice comes in through them, and the burden of the song is that “everything is broken”. Before any song has described the world, the world has been given as already damaged. Then the title track swings in on a big, sweeping chorus with a diver rising too fast, wishing “it was the sixties”: a figure of fame, and of a generation surfacing into air it cannot breathe. The first two songs set the terms of everything after them. The world is broken, the body is a machine under pressure, and the voice that sings them is the most exposed thing on the record.
This was a second record, with a second record’s stake. The band’s first album had carried the grunge of its moment, and a hit, Creep, had threatened to make them a one-song band, with their label’s patience in question. The Bends refused to repeat it. Three guitars replace the grunge wall: Jonny Greenwood’s tremolo and harmonics, Ed O’Brien’s sustained textures and Thom Yorke’s rhythm part, voiced against one another under John Leckie’s production rather than stacked into a mass. Over them Yorke sings in a voice that runs from a near-whisper to a full cry and keeps a break in it, and the break is not a flaw in the singing. It is what the singing is about.
The materials were inherited, and the record makes no secret of it: the sweep and chime of U2 and R.E.M., the loud and quiet of the Pixies, the wounded voice of the Smiths, Jeff Buckley’s falsetto in the near background. What was new was the use the band made of them in 1995, the year British pop turned to laddish nostalgia. Against that swagger the record sets anxiety, falsetto and guitars of a fragile beauty. Twelve songs of about four minutes follow, every one of them sung, with no instrumental, no segue and no reprise. It is a record of songs, and its knowledge is gathered in a handful of them, beginning with the fourth.
Movement II
Fake Plastic Trees begins with an acoustic guitar and a voice held near a whisper. Its world is made of imitations: a plastic tree, a woman who works with plastic surgery, a love that is “fake plastic”. Strings and organ enter, then the full band, and at the height the voice breaks open, singing that “it wears me out”. Then everything falls away and the song ends in the hush it began in. The condition of the fake is not described from outside. It is stated and undergone in under five minutes, in a voice that cannot keep its composure and does not try.
The song is built as its subject. The bare voice climbs toward a full arrangement, toward something that sounds at last like the real thing, and the arrangement collapses back into the small acoustic sound, the fake reasserted. What the song discloses can be stated, and it holds three decades on: in a world of manufactured goods, managed bodies and imitation feeling, the self comes to experience its own life as a fake and its own body as a failing machine, and it collaborates in its own paralysis. The cracked falsetto over acoustic guitar is the fragility the words name, and the sound carries that meaning as surely as the words do.
Not every song states so much. Much of the record renders the mood of the condition rather than its terms, and Black Star and Sulk reach for its anxiety through a general rock grandeur. The condition itself, the consumer’s alienation, was common ground in the decade, and the band’s next record, OK Computer, would set it out more exactly. But this is where the band first found it, in a song whose form, a climb toward the real and a fall back into the fake, is the knowledge it carries. The song sits at the centre of the record, and the rest of the record is heard against it.
Movement III
My Iron Lung is the record’s argument with its own past. A quiet verse gives way to explosive noise and back again, and the song turns on the band’s own hit and passes judgment on it as a “total waste of time”. A young band mocking its own success on the record meant to secure that success was a real risk. The song is required for exactly that reason: without it the record would be a set of beautiful songs, and with it the record knows what it is refusing and says so out loud.
Just, the song before it, is the record’s engine. Its chords keep stepping up and never resolve, so that the trap the words describe is made audible as a climb with no landing, and its guitar solo is a frenzy. Then the song turns its charge on the listener (“do it to yourself”): the paralysis is self-inflicted, and the one who hears is implicated. Between them, Just and My Iron Lung give the record its anger, as Fake Plastic Trees gives it its grief. They are the fake world raged at and the fake world mourned, and the same body, failing and cosseted, is in both.
That body is the record’s one sustained figure. An iron lung, the diver’s bends, bones that fail, a plastic tree, a body wished bullet-proof: the images are medical and mechanical, and together they make the body an apparatus, managed and breaking. It is the record’s most original idea and it holds the songs together. But it is a field of images rather than a pattern. No figure carries a fall or a journey across the sequence, the “she” of one song and the “you” of another stay without name or place, and the songs share their images without building them into a structure.
Movement IV
High and Dry floats. A falsetto ballad sung to a “you”, it is among the record’s most widely known songs, and its height is a drifting rather than a climb. (Nice Dream) begins as a lullaby and turns into a storm of guitar and strings, with the strings entering exactly where the arrangement needs them. Bullet Proof..I Wish I Was is lovely and slight. These are songs of a band in full command of its sound, and the sound rewards close hearing: tremolo against chime against harmonic, with Phil Selway and Colin Greenwood playing beneath it with taste.
The sound travelled. By wide report, the falsetto ballad, the arpeggiated minor-key guitar and the cracked sensitivity of British guitar bands through the following decade descend from this record, and most directly from Fake Plastic Trees, High and Dry and Street Spirit. The band’s next record carried the turn further and wider, and that turn is rightly credited to it. What the earlier record supplied was the language: guitar rock of anxious beauty, with a rich texture and an exposed male voice. It did not reorganise what a rock album could do. It perfected a language that was available, and others took it up, many of them taking the manner and leaving the risk.
The middle and late running is where the record is softest. Bones is a serviceable rocker that restates the failing body already stated, and its grunge-era swagger, like the title track’s, bears its year. Black Star is a good song the record would not miss. Sulk is a lesser Fake Plastic Trees, overwrought in its making, and the loud passages across the record lean on stock distortion. Four of the twelve could go with small loss, and the order between the opening and the close is that of a strong song collection, placed for pace rather than argument. The record is a gathering of songs around a required core.
Movement V
Street Spirit is the only close the record could have. A guitar arpeggio in a minor key circles without escape, rows of houses bear down, and a voice rises over the figure to a long cry. Its last instruction is to “immerse your soul”, and then the song does what its title says: it fades rather than ends. The dissolution it names is enacted by its form. The record that opened in the blur of a world already broken closes on a spirit fading into the dark, the oldest image of the soul’s departure, and the frame from damage to departure is the one the whole record sits inside.
Thirty-one years on, the record survives whole. The album issued in 1995 is the album still played and sold, its order undisturbed, and three of its songs are among the best known of their decade. Part of that presence is carried by what the band did afterwards. The fabric has held better than most guitar records of 1995, because the guitars and voice were kept close and largely unprocessed; the drum sound and the swagger of the rockers date it. It has outlived the moment after Creep that produced it. It has not yet outlived the generation that first heard it, and that test is still to come.
The record’s reach is wider than its world. What it holds is one young man’s malaise in a consumer society, seen from inside: consciousness and the body under management, commerce, a love that is more a “you” than a bond, a city glimpsed in a street. The family, labour, the state, history and the natural order are absent. Its myth is a field of images, and its turn was toward a fuller version of the music it inherited. But it found a subject and a sound that the band would build on and that, by wide report, much of British guitar music took up, and the story of that music cannot be told without it. It ends where it meant to, in a fade.
Act III · The Twelve
Twelve songs of about four minutes, and the subtractive test finds a required core. Planet Telex must open: a blur of reverberating piano and looped drums that gives the world as already damaged, its burden that “everything is broken”. Fake Plastic Trees is the centre, Just the engine, and Street Spirit the compelled end, a fade named in its title. My Iron Lung is required as the record’s argument with its own past, and the title track, High and Dry and (Nice Dream) hold their places by what they add. The test bites in the middle and late running: Bones restates the failing body, Sulk is a lesser Fake Plastic Trees, and Black Star and Bullet Proof..I Wish I Was could go with small loss.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: in a world of manufactured goods, managed bodies and imitation feeling, the self comes to experience its own life as a fake and its body as a failing machine, and collaborates in its paralysis. Fake Plastic Trees states it best: plastic surgery, a love that is “fake plastic”, a singer worn down (“it wears me out”). Just turns the charge on the listener (“do it to yourself”). The cracked falsetto over acoustic guitar is the fragility the words name, and the sound carries the meaning as fully as the words. Held below the bar because much of the record renders mood more than terms, and the consumer’s alienation was common ground in its decade.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Elevation comes often, warm more than cold. Fake Plastic Trees is one summit: an acoustic song that gathers strings, organ and the full band, breaks the voice open at its height and falls back to its first hush. Street Spirit is the other: a circling minor-key arpeggio, a voice rising to a long cry, and a close that asks the listener to “immerse your soul” before the fade. Planet Telex rises in its swirl, the title track swings to a sweeping chorus, High and Dry floats, (Nice Dream) turns from lullaby to storm, and My Iron Lung detonates out of its quiet verse. Bones, Sulk and Black Star have energy without height, and the summits stay within the scale of the rock song.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The record’s figures are medical and mechanical, and together they make one sustained figure: the body as apparatus. An iron lung, the diver’s bends, failing bones, a plastic tree, a body wished bullet-proof. The title track’s diver, rising too fast and wishing “it was the sixties”, is a figure of fame and of a generation surfacing into air it cannot breathe. Street Spirit reaches an archetype outright, a spirit fading into the dark, the oldest image of the soul’s departure, placed where the record ends. What holds the axis is construction: the songs share images rather than a pattern, no figure acts out a fall or a journey, and the “she” and “you” stay without name or place.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The inheritance is the guitar rock of the decade before: U2 and R.E.M. for sweep and chime, the Pixies for loud and quiet, the Smiths for the wounded voice, the grunge of the band’s own first album, Jeff Buckley’s falsetto nearby. The turn and the stake were real. After a hit that threatened to make them a one-song band, with their label’s patience in question, they refused to repeat it, mocked it in My Iron Lung (“total waste of time”), and moved to three-guitar textures, falsetto and an anxiety set against the laddish nostalgia of British pop in 1995. What holds it below the bar is the path: every element was proven, and the turn was toward a fuller guitar rock, not away from it.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Inside the songs, form carries knowledge. Fake Plastic Trees is built as its subject: a bare acoustic voice that swells toward a full arrangement and collapses, the climb toward the real thing and the fall back into the fake. Just climbs by chords that keep stepping up and never resolve, the trap made audible. Street Spirit’s arpeggio circles without escape and fades rather than ends, enacting the dissolution it names. The sequence is a frame, from the damage of Planet Telex to the departure of Street Spirit, and the record could neither begin nor end otherwise. Between them the order is that of a strong song collection, placed for pace, and much of the middle would know the same in another order.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Evidence over thirty-one years, and the formal yield is demonstrated. The record has been returned to steadily, by listeners and by guitarists, and its three guitars are layered in ways that reward close hearing: tremolo against chime against harmonic. The arrangements of Fake Plastic Trees and (Nice Dream) show more on headphones than on the radio, and three decades of return have not used them up. The semantic yield is thinner: the words give most of what they hold on a first hearing, and the images are strong and plain. A share of the return is to known and loved songs, and a share of the re-examination treats the record as a station on the band’s way rather than a well in itself.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The field is the album of the 1990s, the decade of Nevermind, Loveless and the electronic records that reorganised dance and rock. The intrinsic force is a refinement: the record did not reorganise what the rock album could do but perfected an available language, guitar rock of anxious beauty with a rich texture and an exposed male voice. The reach is larger than the force and ran mainly through British rock; the band’s next record carried the turn further, and many who followed took the manner without the risk. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: by wide report, the falsetto ballads and arpeggiated minor-key guitars of British bands through the following decade descend most directly from Fake Plastic Trees, High and Dry and Street Spirit.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival is weighed over thirty-one years. The form is whole: the record issued in 1995 is the record still played and sold, its order undisturbed. Presence is continuous and wide, in sale, reissue, broadcast and streaming, and High and Dry, Fake Plastic Trees and Street Spirit are among the best known British songs of their decade. Popularity counts as presence, not proof, and part of it is carried by the band’s later standing. The fabric has aged better than most guitar records of its year, the guitars and voice kept close and largely unprocessed, though the drum sound and the swagger of Bones and the title track date it. The record has outlived the moment after Creep, not yet its generation of listeners.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, load-bearing in the songs that matter most. John Leckie’s production keeps three guitars distinct in a dense mix: Jonny Greenwood’s tremolo and harmonics, Ed O’Brien’s sustained textures and Thom Yorke’s rhythm part are voiced against one another, not stacked. Yorke’s voice is a precise instrument, from near-whisper to full cry, with the break in it used as content. Strings and organ enter Fake Plastic Trees and (Nice Dream) exactly, and Phil Selway and Colin Greenwood play with taste. The faults fall on a share of the record: Bones and Black Star are conventionally arranged, the loud passages lean on stock distortion, Sulk is overwrought, and some mixes are ordinary rock records of their year.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One law governs the record: a fragile self in a manufactured world, sung in a voice that breaks under it, over guitars that move between chime and storm. The two most distant elements obey it. My Iron Lung, quiet verse and explosive noise aimed at the band’s own success, and Fake Plastic Trees, a near-acoustic lament, are the fake world raged at and the fake world mourned, with the same failing, cosseted body in both. Street Spirit carries the law to its end, dissolution. It strains at Black Star and Sulk, which reach for the record’s anxiety by general rock grandeur rather than its particular physics, and at the title track’s swagger. What holds it short is range, ballad to thrash: narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as anxiety, paralysis and self-reproach. The body and medicine are held fully, the record’s most original order: the iron lung, the bends, failing bones, plastic surgery, each a way the manufactured world reaches into the flesh. Commerce is present as the plastic world and the music business, joined to the body in Fake Plastic Trees. The couple appears as a “you” and a “she” more than a bond; the city is glimpsed in Street Spirit’s rows of houses; the sacred enters only as its closing soul. What holds the figure is absence: the family, labour, the state, history and the natural order are missing, and the orders present lie close together, seen from inside one young man’s malaise.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition, The Made and The Inner Law, each at 8.6. A falsetto ballad and arpeggiated minor-key guitar from which, by wide report, the sound of British guitar bands for a decade descends; three guitars voiced against one another and a voice whose break is content, load-bearing in the songs that matter most; and one law, a fragile self in a manufactured world, that holds from the rage of My Iron Lung to the lament of Fake Plastic Trees.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.2: consciousness and the managed body held fully, commerce and the couple present, and the family, labour, the state, history and the natural order absent. Below the rest, The Archetypal Deep at 7.7, where the body as apparatus is a sustained figure but no pattern bears load across the sequence, and The Swerve at 8.1, a real turn and a real stake on a proven path.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, and The Imperishable meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.3, The Swerve at 8.1 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.7 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.7, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met, and the aggregate, 8.2, stands short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · the album as released by Parlophone in the United Kingdom on 13 March 1995, and by Capitol in the United States later that spring, twelve tracks in their original order, produced by John Leckie, about forty-eight and a half minutes; judged from knowledge of the recording, its words and its reception. No recording or lyric sheet was in hand, and running times are approximate. The singles and the My Iron Lung EP are evidence, not the object. Songs are cited by title; lyric fragments of four words or fewer are quoted only where certain. The record’s reach into later British guitar music is stated as reported. Facts that could not be verified, among them the further production, engineering and mixing credits, the studios and dates of the sessions, the source of the recording of My Iron Lung, the singles and chart positions, the exact running time and the occasion of Sulk, are not given.