ONLY two weeks ago I was arguing on this page that angst was out, self-pity was passe, and that the best new groups are fired by self-belief, not self-loathing. How wrong can you be?
Radiohead are still best known for their 1993 hit, Creep, a deformed anthem ("I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo") that evidently struck a chord with record buyers all over the western world. But with their second album, The Bends, the five-man group from Oxford has raised the stakes, converting an existential mood of anguish, despair and inner turmoil into an alternative rock masterpiece.
"I wish I could be happy, I wish, I wish, I wish that something would happen," Thom Yorke sings in a tone of quiet but rapidly escalating desperation on the title track. At the age of 26, his vision of the world leaves him feeling, at best, comfortably numb. "We're too young to fall asleep, too cynical to speak," he sings on My Iron Lung, as if distracted by a cloud passing in the sky, while the innate prettiness of the accompanying guitar arpeggio is disfigured by an ugly sheen of distortion. "Suck your teenage thumb, toilet-trained and dumb," he continues, with truly spectacular disdain.
Quite why feeling this grim should act as such an efficient motor of creativity remains a mystery. But there are too many wonderful songs on The Bends from the current radio-friendly hit, High And Dry, to the mysteriously desolate Fake Plastic Trees for it to be an accident. My favourite is Black Star, where the big, jangling guitars and dense drum sound are harnessed to a heartbreaking melody which Yorke sings in a yearning near-falsetto. It is the sound of a man leaning dangerously over the edge of the precipice, and gazing at a panorama of unimaginable beauty below.