The Bends

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The album starts with PLANET TELEX, then goes onto THE BENDS which I particularly like, followed by HIGH & DRY and FAKE PLASTIC TREES which are two of my favourites on the album, because they both have great guitarring, clever lyrics and an amazing chorus. BONES is next, followed by NICE DREAM, and JUST is after that, one of the best on the album, followed by MY IRON LUNG which is also one of my favourites. BULLET PROOF... I WISH I WAS is next, also brilliant, BLACK STAR is another one of my favourites and the final two are SULK and STREET SPIRIT [FADE OUT]. For most albums I would rate each song out of 10, but there is no need in this case because they are all 10/10. This album consists only of great songs, with the best being HIGH AND DRY, JUST, and my personal favourite, FAKE PLASTIC TREES.

Trust me, and buy Radiohead's 'The Bends', because I guarantee you will like it. Everyone else I know who listened to it ended up buying it, that's how good it is. The average customer rating is 5 stars, and only 11 out of 330 reviewed this less than four stars. Some albums have 'it', that very rare something that very few albums have, where it spends weeks in your CD player, it is the only one you listen to, and 'The Bends' is one of them, it has 'it'.


Radiohead's MTV styled masterpiece.   December 28, 2001
Mike London (Oxford, UK)
31 out of 32 found this review helpful

I have something to admit: I've been living under a rock. It's been a nice cozy little rock, with lots of shade and that sort of thing, but I thought I'd go out and see what was happening in the world. You can miss a lot living under a rock, including culture. I've only found out about Radiohead, and I mean really found out about them, this year. Not only that, I've only been really listening to them since October. You may ask how I've gone so long without hearing about Radiohead. That's a really good question. Of course I knew their song "Creep," but after that I wrote them off as a one-hit wonder, and it was a hit I didn't really much care for (I'm still not a big fan of that track). Well, along came my discovery of OK COMPUTER, and I decided I had to get it. And of course, THE BENDS as well. Both are outstanding albums.

These two albums are Radiohead's most popular albums, and generally there are two factions of the Radiohead camp, each thinking their prospective album is better than the other. Personally, I think OK COMPUTER is a better album overall, but track-for-track I'd take THE BENDS. Listening to THE BENDS is very similar to listening to a Beatles record: if you didn't know any better you would almost swear this is a greatest hits record or something. Each track is very noteworthy and Radiohead does not falter at all. Speaking of tracks, there are notable non-album tracks which would only have enhanced this album. The six tracks on MY IRON LUNG ep (not counting the title cut and the acoustic version of "Creep") would have been fantastic on here, and as I understand it are actually outtakes from this album. Each of the six tracks are as good as anything found on here. Also, there are some good tracks which I have obtained though I don't know if they are commercially released or not (some are B-Sides). These are: "Yes, It Is," "Killer Cars," "Molasses," "Man of War,"and "How Can You Be sure."

All these stunning tracks coming from the band who, only two years before, released the unremarkable PABLO HONEY, makes this achievement all the more noteworthy. This record plays like a band who has gotten a handle on where they want to go with their music and really pursuing that whereas with the 1993 release it seemed more they were getting used to even being musicians in the first place.

Another noteworthy thing to mention is this is Radiohead for the MTV generation. This is them making high-quality guitar rock that is both accessible and artistically satisfying, which, unfortunately, has become increasingly rarer in the 1990s and the start of the new decade. It is both very accessible to the mass audience and also pleasing to the critics, and is an across-the-board success, which, quite frankly, OK COMPUTER is not. This is Radiohead doing radio-friendly rock, delivering one spectacular album which is one of the best of its kind before going on a very varied musical journey leaving this far beyond and getting much more experimental in nature.

Of their (so far) three more "high-brow" musical efforts (OK C, KID A, AMNESIAC), OK COMPUTER is both the most popular and the best critically received. For personal taste, I prefer OK COMPUTER to this release, but both are incredible albums. However, they're totally different albums, and OK COMPUTER marks the more conceptual and experimental path they are currently still on. The effect of the overall album is more impressive and long lasting on OK C than it is on THE BENDS. THE BENDS sounds like a study in radio-friendly rock, a compilation of all of rock's greatest moments whose only underlying connection is the tracks have a mass appeal and were big hits. Each track of THE BENDS sounds like it could have been a number one hit. On OK COMPUTER, that is not true. While all the songs shimmer with brilliance and remarkable beauty, OK COMPUTER better stands as an overall album than just track for track. Much of OK's impact comes from the conceptual and album-driven cohesion which binds it altogether into a unified whole, and while each song is both fascinating and remarkable the overall impact is what really makes OK such a fantastic album.

But that would be a full two years away, and Radiohead was more concerned with making really good pop music. It's almost as if Radiohead knew their direction and knew they had to get this out before they could go onto the more artier side of their music, and to their credit this comes across not only as radio-friendly rock but an unqualified masterpiece which modern pop should be judge against.


Radiohead's Best Album   March 21, 2002
drew m (maryland United States)
26 out of 30 found this review helpful

Since the Bends turned Radiohead into one of the world's preeminent rock bands, the band has moved away from the more traditional song structures featured on The Bends in favor of new ways to express their themes of alienation, isolation, and seething rage.

But the Bends is still Radiohead's best work, and for obvious reasons. Epic in scope without being self-indulgent, The Bends takes the distorted guitars of grunge and adds a sense of melodrama and good old rock-n-roll majesty that, at that time, had been missing from popular music for almost two decades. In blending the two together, along with adding their own distinctly British personality, Radiohead makes The Bends a landmark recording that still feels fresh today seven years after its initial release.

The record has that wonderful touch of arrogance that transforms the band from one-hit brooders (as on "Creep") to bonafide rock gods. The guitars on the opening "Planet Telex" thunder in, heralding the band's arrival to the rock stratosphere, and the album just goes and goes from there. Every song works, be it balls out rock songs ("Bones"), or quieter, ghostly pieces ("Street Spirit," "Fake Plastic Trees"). All of it is tied together by lead singer Thom Yorke's voice. Credit Yorke with somehow making a voice that should, by all accounts, be incredibly irritating resonate and echo in the mind of the listener. It's alternately haunting, raging, and powerful; even making the transition from gentle lullabying to Billy Idol-quality snarling in the course of a single song ("Nice Dream"). It's a wonderful performance, and the band underneath matches him note for note.

Radiohead has released records more complex (OK Computer), more challenging (Kid A), and more ambiguous (Amnesiac) than The Bends. But they've never made a better record. And, in a way, that's a good thing. Free from the burden of having to create their rock masterpiece (which this is), they've branched out in new directions to see how far they can push the outer limits of both their music and their collective psyche. It is that later work that makes Radiohead one of the world's most important bands, but it is The Bends that makes them [behind] kicking rock stars. And everybody loves the latter.