- theguardian.com,
Guardian.co.uk/music has more than 3m album pages, where you can submit your own review of pretty much any record. See here for information on how to do it.
Earlier this week we asked readers to submit reviews of their favourite Radiohead album. Below are excerpts from readers' reviews for each album – but which do you think is best?
Listen to official albums & more. Check it out. Find out why Close. Rare Radiohead Concert Footage Emo McDonalds. Unsubscribe from Emo McDonalds? My Radiohead Top Rarities By. This one is often presented as the top Radiohead rarity because it was never released. It's very rare for sure but I do not think it's the rarest. 5 Radiohead - Let Down (Remix) Radiohead - Let Down (Remix).
Have a read, then let us know what you think by voting in the poll at the foot of the page.
Loosieb on Pablo Honey
To my 17 year old self Pablo Honey was anger, energy, hope, rage, angst, fear – all the things that I clung to with a weird masochistic adolescent pride. There is a lot of fight in Pablo-era Radiohead, this is a band who took an audience on and were serious about having something to prove. In 1993, when the hackneyed glam of Suede was considered to be the best thing since sliced bread, this quintet of ostensibly polite Oxfordian misfits didn't have the necessary rock 'n' roll chops to impress the then influential weekly music press. But I wanted this band, who played like they really meant it, to succeed. Pablo Honey is still what first albums should sound like (but these days don't get the room to). A band finding their feet, exhausting their initial influences and becoming truly themselves.
Geneson on The Bends
The Bends is not Radiohead's most ground breaking album - it is, however, arguably their most complete album, their finest showcase of song writing. It is every bit as stunning in its ambitious scope as their subsequent work, spanning twelve flawless tracks that are more cohesively in tune with each other than any other Radiohead recording. The Bends contains moments that remain utterly unique to the Radiohead catalogue. They've never quite reached the glorious majestic heights as they do in the second half of Fake Plastic Trees. They've never channelled their anger and tension as directly as in My Iron Lung. Street Spirit (Fade Out) remains their most fitting and timeless album closer, for a band that is renowned for them. At its core though, The Bends is a collection of stadium rock anthems and moody rainy-day gems all in one.
theslider on OK Computer
Thom Yorke's wonderfully melancholic falsetto; Jonny Greenwood's sublime guitar work; the soaring harmonies; the frosty soundscapes. OK Computer was a work of immense quality by a band who knew exactly what they wanted, and would not compromise in achieving it. Radiohead's quest for musical development went even further after this release, incorporating electronica and the avant-garde on next album Kid A, but it is here on OK Computer that they truly reached their songwriting apex. The complex epic of 'Paranoid Android', conjoining at least three distinct sections; the lush dream pop of 'No Surprises'; the emotive depth of 'Karma Police'; the grand scale of closer 'The Tourist'. OK Computer is simply an astonishing listen.
Modeon on Kid A
The mark of a great album is one that reveals itself through successive listens, one that enables you to keep revisiting and re-exploring. The fact that it was a total game-changer in a landscape of musical uncertainty cements its place in rock and roll history. Radiohead were the first band of the modern age to truly shake off the shackles ascribed to them by the very industry who made them successful, and do it their way. Up until OK Computer, Radiohead were just another British guitar band. After Kid A, they were the band that everybody else wanted to be. Kid A's beauty lies in its minimalism, its sparseness and its intensity. And it is a truly beautiful album.
PopcornDuff on Amnesiac
Amnesiac's dissonant jumble of tracks, scattered like fragmented memories, seem sequenced deliberately to chafe and dislocate. That only makes its voyage more enchanting. The band's jazz influences are clearer here than anywhere - particularly in Phil Selway's drumming, all ride cymbal and shuffling snares - along with laptop clicks, reverberating guitars, krautrock drones and Jonny Greenwood's star-struck strings. It's sinister stuff, yet there's so much warmth here. The centrepiece is 'Pyramid Song', for my money Radiohead's most affecting work. Wavering strings and snatches of half-heard conversation hover throughout like decaying memories. There's something of the mystic about Amnesiac altogether: elusive yet cleansing, frightening yet cathartic, with its themes of death and rebirth, repression and release, and - as evoked by the title - forgetting and remembering.
SueMayhem on Hail to the Thief
This album portrays Radiohead's growth and maturity from their past two experimental albums and has a more distinctive sound. 'Hail to the Thief' is one of those albums which sparks so much emotion admist its web of electronic brilliance. A combination rare in music, let alone rock. It may not be the album I choose to listen to everyday (this is where 'Kid A' and 'Amnesiac' step in) but on the rare occasion I play it, it hits me that the black sheep of all Radiohead albums creates visceral convictions far more valid than the rest of their works.
DavidTimms on In Rainbows
It may not be as culturally significant as OK Computer, or as musically revolutionary as Kid A, but no other album so perfectly encapsulates everything which puts Radiohead head and shoulders above their peers.
With 'In Rainbows', Radiohead managed to write a collection of songs which are instantly engrossing and wide reaching in their appeal, but so exquisitely crafted that they reveal new details and emotions with each listen. The consistency of In Rainbows is astonishing. It's an album which manages to make the songs fit together into a listening experience which is greater than the sum of its parts. In case you can't tell, this is my favourite album of all time.
StephanoBentos on The King of Limbs
The thing about The King Of Limbs is it's like one piece of music. Fp200a sensor driver windows 7 64. A half hour electro-wonk-opera. It does nothing Radiohead have not done before, but it does do the sort of things they've done for a while now, very very well. And very completely. The album's unusual in structure. It is front loaded with awkward rain pouring rhythms (Bloom) which had me checking my headphone lead for breaks on first listen. And yet I was delighted to find the cut & paste parps were as intended. Towards the end there are softer melodies (Codex) and even the odd guitar riff (Give Up The Ghost). The King Of Limbs is like a best bits montage of Radiohead post Kid A. It blips, swoons, buzzes and croons like bits of In Rainbows, Amnesiac and Hail To The Thief put through a blender, but only the choicest cuts.
Which is the greatest Radiohead album? | |
---|---|
Pablo Honey | |
15% | The Bends |
OK Computer | |
23% | Kid A |
Amnesiac | |
4% | Hail to the Thief |
In Rainbows | |
2% | The King of Limbs |