[Welcome to Sophomore/Sophomoric, where we'll catalog the tiptoed journeys of the literally thousands of bands who have attempted, not all of them successfully, to navigate their way from debut success and past the proverbial "sophomore slump" into the rarefied air of "sophomore glory." Is that a term? It'd be better if it was alliterative. How about, "sophomore splendor"? That works better, yeah.]

Words by Jacob Barron

Artist: Radiohead
Albums: Pablo Honey (1993) & The Bends (1995)

Sophomore is a term used to describe the second year of a four year schooling program, or anything that immediately follows the first of something. It makes no judgment, and connotes neither greatness nor crappiness. Sophomoric is a term used to deride pretentious comments and writing from students, like when I said my favorite film was “Citizen Kane” in my film and literature class my sophomore year. That shit was super sophomoric. However, not everything that’s a sophomore is sophomoric. Get it? You will.

Anyway, I thought long and hard about what band would be the subject of Sophomore/Sophomoric’s very first case file. Then I realized that it would be stupid to open with anything other than Radiohead here, a band whose vaunted critical reputation is now unquestioned, but has its roots in an album that at least has the reputation of being rather vanilla, if not plainly awful. Could a band as legendarily great as Radiohead really have started out with an album that really, really blew?

Short answer: no. No they could not have, and no they didn’t.

I really only got hugely into Radiohead after Hail to the Thief, an album released a full decade after the band’s debut. Sure, I knew their singles, but Hail to the Thief arrived and I went balls-out crazy on Radiohead’s back catalog. I worked reverse-chronologically, going from Hail to the Thief to Amnesiac and Kid A, two albums that I pretended to understand, but still truly loved on a visceral, “this kicks ass” level. Then paused for a really, really long time on OK Computer, which I think is normal, especially when you’re getting to it right around late 2003, when all of the things it anticipated were happening all around you in spades.

After the prophetic genius of OK Computer, I then moved to The Bends, their sophomore effort (FORESHADOW). The Bends is Radiohead, easily, at their most listenable, their most comfortable. It’s the sound of a band frankly, openly, and maturely addressing the many, many, many things that alienate them; an emotional record that lets nothing off the hook, without a doubt, but that still sounds in love with the world somehow. On OK Computer, Radiohead were prophets. On The Bends, they were just kids wise beyond their years.

And then I stopped.

It wasn’t really my fault. I mean, I knew “Creep” and that was enough to know off of Pablo Honey. At least that was the conventional wisdom when I got around to downloading it, probably via Kazaa or Limewire or something.

In my mind, at least back then, Pablo Honey was revered as an album that reached almost comically awful depths of suckery. It was the massive pile of flannel-wearing horseshit that the band had to crap out before they could start blowing gold all over the place. It was the beam in thine eye that had to be cast out before you could cast out the mote in thy brother’s eye. It was, on a more positive note, a monument to how, if you suck, you don’t have to suck forever. Look at Radiohead, right?

I think I poked around the album a few times, stopping to hear “Blow Out” and think, “hey, that sounds kind of like Nirvana” and then listening to a minute or two of “Stop Whispering” before thinking “okay maybe this isn’t so good” and then abandoning it entirely in favor of other, greater iterations of Radiohead. Also, I saw this picture of Thom’s hair and was put off. Seriously, look at it. LOOK AT IT:

“Stop Whispering” is pretty bad, but I think that’s because it sounds like it’s of its time, which is probably the only complaint I could level at Pablo Honey as a whole, at least after giving it several re-listens recently. Radiohead has come to represent forward-thinking and experimentation so completely that when they sound like they fit in, they sound like they’re out of touch. The King of Limbs might be another example; a good album, but maybe not a great one because it sounds too much like a lot of what’s out there. Pablo Honey is pure early 90s guitar rock in a lot of its worst places (while “Stop Whispering” is my absolute least favorite Radiohead song, “Lurgee” is pretty lame too). It sounds like an album that was released in 1993, which it was. It’s only in retrospect that we can look at it and say that it was bad, because we’re so wonderfully aware of what the band is capable of.

There are some seriously innovative bright spots peppered throughout the album though, ones that make sense, and hold up as early manifestations of Radiohead’s bleak, experimental approach to commercial success. I have a soft spot for “Thinking About You” and opener “You” has a nostalgic charm to it, while “Anyone Can Play Guitar” is punky power-pop that anticipated “Just” from The Bends. And yes, “Creep,” although you’ve heard it a million-billion times, might as well be the Radiohead theme song, for the band and its fans. It’s their most successful song, and I saw them perform it live on the Hail to the Thief tour, a gesture of such exquisite irony that despite my knee-jerk leanings against the tune, I put my arm around the two Radiohead fans next to me and screamed the chorus until my throat was raw. It’s come full circle to being the dirty secret that the band rejected, to being the genius thank-you card to the fans, from a band that doesn’t have to thank anyone. Also, it’s really just a good tune.

In any case, it’s worth a listen again. Pablo Honey isn’t as bad as we’ve been saying it is for so long, and even has some classic moments that sounded ahead of their time. Still, I’ve come up with a rating system here for Sophomore/Sophomoric, one that judges a sophomore effort against its predecessor and ranks it as a step forward, a step back, or a lateral move. No matter how numerous the oft-overlooked riches of Pablo Honey are, The Bends is still The Bends, and it marks the beginning of Radiohead’s journey from being a band, to being the band.

I mentioned earlier that we’ve come to expect Radiohead to sound like music from the future. That started on The Bends, an album that came out in 1995 but that could’ve easily made more sense much later. It fused rock with real emotion in a way that Arcade Fire replicated in 2004, on Funeral (expect an entry on that vs. Neon Bible in the near future) and it was smartly ambient and orchestral when not a lot of other people were (see “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” and “Bulletproof…I Wish I Was”). It understood drama (I still can barely listen to “Fake Plastic Trees”) and how to write a rock song that didn’t condescend to the listener, and still managed to actually rock (“Just,” “Black Star,” etc.).

Between Pablo Honey and The Bends, it sounds like Radiohead tightened up as a band. Yorke really came into his own as a songwriter that could express what everyone else was trying to express, in a way that no one else was expressing it, without putting anyone off, and the band tried to define its own space, rather than make their own unique mark on someone else’s. In some ways, it just sounds like the band stopped caring about what anyone else thought, and did what they had always wanted, and, when you’re dealing with musicians as intelligent as Radiohead, that’s the best that anyone can really hope for in a sophomore effort.

Step Forward, Step Back, or Lateral Move?: (Enormous) Step Forward

Leave us some comments on how you feel Radiohead progressed from Pablo Honey to The Bends. This one’s easy, but we’d love to hear what you’re thinking

Filed under: Not Blake, Jim, or Brendan, Sophomore/Sophomoric