Albums by this artist

It's hard to imagine it all began for Radiohead with Pablo Honey. Years later, even casual listens to the album reveal serious debts to any number of influences, particularly the empassioned wail of sound trademarked by Bono and U2. But hindsight allows for the fascinating chance to hear Radiohead evolve before our very ears. Indeed, for anyone put off by the frigid, clinical "song"writing of Kid A and Amnesiac, a loud blaring of "Stop Whispering" may remind you why you got into this band in the first place.

"Creep" was likely the average rock fan's intro to Radiohead back in the day, but the track was rightfully pegged as a younger musical brother-in-arms to such self-loathing anthems as Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Beck's "Loser" (even though it preceded the latter by a year). Still, Thom Yorke's mini-melodrama was distinctive even if the melody wasn't, and "Creep" holds up about as well as any of the other songs on the album.

At its core, Yorke's struggle to effectively translate myriad frustrations into worthy lyrics gives Pablo Honey its zing. Minus a few cringe-worthy couplets, "Thinking About You" and "Lurgee" are fairly accomplished working templates for love songs that the frontman later improved upon with "Let Down" and "High & Dry." His ability to elevate even the most self-defeating of storylines is also well in place on the heart-pinching "I Can't," which sports a glorious outtro showered with the firecracking guitars that mark soon-to-follow classics like "Just" and "My Iron Lung."

But our boy Thom is no open book. Right off the bat, he's enigmatic both in his verse and his ever-changing vocal phrasing. "Ripcord" gets style points for its shredding, grunge-y riffs, but Yorke's fey sneering delivery is for the birds. He actually longs to "be Jim Morrison" in the catchy racket "Anyone Can Play Guitar," but the song's inherent mockery of rock'n'roll comes off as a rather pretentious, of-the-moment statement from such a young band.

The musicians turn the tables on Yorke in "Vegetable," overly amping up what begins as a restrained declaration of faith in one's self. Other songs show the band dodging underdeveloped arrangements to get by on unbridled, pure emotion. Exhibit A: Yorke's vibrato wailing at the end of "Prove Yourself," which will raise the hairs on the back of your neck, if the dark chorus doesn't first.

While Yorke was working out his issues, the band itself was honing in on what aspects of its sound worked best. There's a lot of noise for noise's sake on songs like "Blow Out," tipping some of the more outlandish sound experiments that appear on later albums. But Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien's largely cliche-free chord changes prove very compelling in their own right on "Prove Yourself" and "Lurgee." You can tell they've got great ideas brewing.

By the following year's "My Iron Lung" EP, it was clear Radiohead was improving at a dramatic rate. With that rapid evolution in mind, Pablo Honey serves as an effective scrapbook of the quintet at this point in its existence. What's inside is a band on the cusp of something much greater.

JONATHAN COHEN | Jonathan Cohen co-created Nude As The News with his Indiana University mates Troy Carpenter and Ben French. When not traversing the globe for business and pleasure, he holds down the fort as a senior editor for Billboard in New York. Stop him and he just may ask, "what for lunch?"