Radiohead's Amnesiac

Nine months after rock, at first glance, disappeared from the new record of one of the world's biggest rock bands, rock graces the new Radiohead album full bore, but for only four minutes and 15 seconds. "Knives Out," halfway through Amnesiac, features prominent vocals, dour guitars, propulsive 4/4 rhythms awash in ride cymbal and a sugar-coma bass line. And it's an astonishingly majestic album's only travesty.

Following months of rumors about the imminent release of an album that would return Radiohead to the two-guitars-drums-bass-vocal flock after October's strain mutation Kid A, it's poetic justice that Amnesiac's only unadulterated rock track is also the record's only one-dimensional moment. Recorded during the Kid A sessions, Amnesiac can't represent artistic growth, but its first five songs are simply perfect, balmy and exciting with equal force. On "Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box" Thom Yorke addresses the expectations his band has built, with panache: "After years of waiting/nothing came." On this first track Radiohead acknowledge the electronic music they employ has been a floating signifier for cultural futurism as long as they've been alive. Drum machines click and sequenced sounds arpeggiate.

"Pyramid Song," the first single, is written in 3/4, led by Yorke's vocals, a clanging piano and a beautifully stammering drum line. "I Might Be Wrong" features vicious guitar reminiscent of P.J. Harvey's twanging "50 Ft. Queenie" in front of a dirty 808-esque rhythm shuffle, then falls into complete, euphoric chaos. In "Life In a Glasshouse," Yorke cinematically details atrophied relationships in front of a wind band and trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton. For a group that sells millions of records, it's extraordinarily brave to verge on parody like this and nearly miraculous to emerge with such a compelling song.

EMI plans to release "Knives Out" as the album's second single in July, putting Amnesiac's rock face forward at the expense of stronger tracks. "Knives Out" also contradicts exactly what makes Radiohead significant: the band represents a mass-market appetite for experimentation. Kid A debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. While its supremacy was brief, records with a dearth of vocals and an abundance of strange electronic sounds never reach that vaunted position. Kid A demonstrated that an unignorable number of first-world teenagers are willing to countenance a record of blips, groans, fuzzes and throbs. But immediately after the album's release those rumors about a "rock record" began?never mind what Kid A had accomplished. Just as Radiohead established themselves as the world's most innovative and unconventional successful rock band, people wondered when the fever would break. Amnesiac's title flirts with the answer.

Although there's a galaxy of musical distance between Radiohead and everything else stocked at Wal-Mart, the truth is that Radiohead in fact plays rock music with different instruments. While their recent arrangements tend away from verses and choruses in favor of extended electronic variations on certain themes traceable to Steve Reich, the band's rhythms and melodies show the sloping forehead and barely opposable thumb of rock 'n' roll. Amnesiac will not sound like indecipherable cultural noise to anyone around here. A refreshing, nuanced and arresting record in its own right, how the new album fares might also indicate whether the mainstream will absorb further sounds that are currently designated as "fringe." Already mainstream music magazines like Rolling Stone are singing the praises of Sigur Ros, the Icelandic postrock phenomenon Radiohead brought along on its recent European tour. SoundScan might tell us something interesting this summer.