I will do this in two parts as otherwise the post would get too long and you would have to wait another day for the complete review.

The band name

Radio Head by The Talking Heads (bold by me)

The band how I saw it I have always hated hyped bands. One reason for this is that I don't like that the world shoves me the music I should listen to into my ears. I love to discover new music. Like an explorer loves to discover new countries. And I do not like packaged tours to places where everyone has been already and which have lost all their authenticity due to the millions of people who have tread those paths before.

Additionally very often hyped bands have been huge disappointments for me. Radiohead was no exception to this rule. Almost everything they did before Amnesiac didn't do anything for me. I felt it had all been done before better and without this irritating and embarrassing falsetto. Ok there was Creep their first single from 1992 I heard on Bernard Lenoir's radio program and later on MTV. A very catchy dramatic indie rock ballad with personal lyrics which seemed to be so fitting to their singer Thom Yorke that it hurt. Just take the first strophe:

At the time there was no-one in the world to whom the term "creep" seemed more appropriate than Thom Yorke, a pale shy unremarkable guy from Oxford singing for an unknown indie band with the ridiculuous nonsense name Radiohead.

Later on in 1995 there was the sampler for the Bosnian kids who suffered from the civil war to which Radiohead contributed Lucky, a bitter-sweet ballad which was later to be the outstanding song on OK Computer, a totally over-hyped album which I have always found of hardly any interest at all. In places it sounded like a shitty Pink Floyd for the nineties. Mostly unbearable. My point of view is that progrock belongs into the seventies and should never resurface again.

The title A: What was the name of that album again? B: It must have slipped my mind. A: That's the one.

Thom Yorkes said that Amnesiac "is about the things you forget. And remembering..." At best this is half of the truth I suspect. The themes Yorke sings about on Amnesiac are too serious to forget about. Divorce, brutality and death are unforgettable once you have experienced them. And I still believe that Yorke has experienced them himself. Otherwise he would be an amazing actor, an incredible liar. But the way he sings suggests that he isn't. His voice simply is too intense, too pure.

My theory is different. I don't know where Thom Yorke has been to be able to write the lyrics to this album. But it definitely isn't a place I'd ever like to go to. And I guess he doesn't want to go there again neither. That's why they released Kid A first and tried to forget about the other tracks recorded at roughly the same time. I could imagine that if Kid A hadn't been so widely acclaimed they probably would never have released Amnesiac at all. In a way it is a record which would have been better left in the drawer than exposed to the world. The album is not about real amnesia which usually comes to you after an accident. It is about a wanted, a consciously strived for amnesia. To forget things which are too horrible, too devastating to think back to.

1. Find out the geographical coordinates of your place, e.g. via maporama.
2. Add a meta tag with the latitude and longitude, in my case (I rounded to the third digit after the comma not to give away my exact coordinates).
3. Ping the GeoURLServer (only once) to tell it that your page has been updated.
4. Add a link pointing to your neighbours. Here is mine:

The directory is still rather empty for Germany. There are only about hundred registered sites (including some doubles) within 192 miles of where I live.

You can't imagine how much I crave a cigarette right now. The nicotine patch I am wearing doesn't help at all. I can't concentrate enough to go on with my review. No. I don't want to concentrate without a cigarette. Sorry for this lamentable post. I hope these hard times will pass. In the meantime a small poll.

is always the most difficult when stopping smoking. At least that is my experience after something like a dozen of tries. I started to write about my 2001 fave album. Listening to it didn't really help. It made me want to be amnesiac (!) concerning my past (haha!) nicotine addiction...

J'aime vraiment l'expression Il y a du monde au balcon. Et ce qu'il se cache derrière. Faux. Quand il y a du monde au balcon ça ne se cache pas du tout...

Ernst Jünger via caterina.net:

I'd like to be a teetotaller but I guess I am more the opposite though I have been a tea addict for most of my life. I can't start the day without a pot of tea. It wakes up my mind. Besides drinking their infusion I also love to smoke leaves. Of a different kind of course. But that's another story and I am happy to have survived day number two without smoking...

According to Aquarius Records again:

Sorry dear reader I'll have to bore you once again by writing on one of my favourite non-music themes.

Today was my 1st day without cigarettes. It was bloody difficult not to smoke (oh God the day isn't over will it be a bad omen to post this prematurely?). That’s a good thing. As the more difficult it is to stop the higher the chance that I won’t start again knowing how difficult it would be to stop again.

In the past it was often the contrary. Dead easy to stop and after a while (maximum about two months) I got bored and started again as I knew how easy it would be to stop again.

I know that thinking too much about the act of stopping smoking is stupid and does not increase the chances to succeed. But I love it. If I go on like this and I am quite positive I will soon I will be able to write a book about How not to stop smoking. 100% success rate. Satisfaction/money back guarantee ;-)

I like imaginative initiatives which bypass our society's fuel, money by replacing it with social and creative intelligence. This warms my heart:

Dark Beloved Cloud

P.S. Dear reader, I'd like to draw your attention to the "recently modified" box on the right-hand side sandwiched in between the search and the links. From now on I will copy and paste news items I found in other places on the web into the topic music, news. They won't appear on the main page as they are just copied stories and they would clutter the weblog but they will be online in the topic. The most direct link to them is via "recently modified". Today's news are dominated by Wilco...

In the meantime I created a blogroll at blogrolling which is displayed on your right-hand side for the time being. The big disadvantage of blogrolling is that it gets the update data only from weblogs.com. Apparently only very few music weblogs ping weblogs.com. Or do you believe that of the 120 sites in the link section only ten weblogs have been updated in the last 48 hours?