My Iron Lung EP

I just listened to the songs that make up the My Iron Lung EP. It sounds like the band's creativity is really starting to take off.

I really enjoyed taking the time to sit and listen to this CD. I had considered putting the songs on my ipod and listening to them while at work or even on my morning commute but I'm glad that I waited until I was home so that I could relax and really listen. The experience made me wonder: how does a professional rock writer listen to the records that they are assigned to review? I would hope that each reviewer at Rolling Stone or Spin is allowed to take the promo CD home, to be played on their own stereo system, allowing them to fully invest themselves in the sonic experience. After all, if album reviews are meant to inform a potential music consumer whether or not a specific album is worth owning, then it makes sense that the reviewer would try to replicate the experience of buying a CD and then listening to it in their home, as the consumer would likely do. I imagine the offices of all the major rock magazines being extremely noisy, with newly recorded songs blasting out of every office. Chances are, this is not at all how things go down at Rolling Stone. The reviewers probably listen to the music on headphones while sitting at their desk, which is probably in some sort of cubicle. I also wonder how many times a professional music critic will listen to an album before starting to write about it.

I listened to this EP twice.

ALBUM: My Iron Lung EP

YEAR RELEASED: 1994

NOTABLE SONGS: My Iron Lung (duh.) This song really blew me away. It opens with a guitar riff that seems to be in a major key, and yet it has a strange effect added to it that makes it seem like it's being dragged into a major key. The only way I can describe the guitar effect is that it makes the guitar sound corroded, like the master tape had a nasty encounter with battery acid. At this point, I can't remember where I heard that this song was written about their other song, Creep. The first verse seems to be a plea for their newly found fans to back off and give the band some room to breathe - quite literally. "You don't mean it/but it hurts like hell/my brain/says I'm receiving pain/a lack of oxygen/from my life support." I remembered seeing the band perform Creep at the MTV Beach House (on TV, of course, I wasn't actually there), and even back then I remembered thinking that those guys looked pretty unhappy to be singing that song.

So they did what any good artist does: they use their hatred of themselves as inspiration to create more art.

The third verse sounds almost as if the band is insulting their empty-headed listeners: "suck, suck your teenage thumb/toilet trained and dumb". It's not a wise move to start insulting people between the ages of 12 and 20 when you're in a rock band. It's sure to cut into your sales figures. If there's one easy way to piss off a teenager, it's by comparing them to a baby. Claiming that said teenager still sucks his or her thumb and is newly toilet trained is likely to make them so angry that they won't even hear Radiohead call them stupid; they will have transformed themselves into a band-hating monster, who will promptly burn their Radiohead concert t-shirt and go find another band to fall in love with, like Live or Collective Soul.

I doubt that this effort to weed out their more meatheaded fans worked; no one really gets that mad about a song that doesn't mention a person by name because everyone assumes that they are the smart ones, they aren't the people being derided in the song.

Kurt Cobain attempted the same thing in his song "In Bloom", written about his idiot friend Dylan Carlson, who, "likes all our pretty songs" and "likes to shoot his guns/but he/don't know what it means". Kurt took it a step further when Incesticide came out, an album of b-sides released in the post-Nevermind Nirvana craze. Inside the CD booklet is a fairly long open letter from Kurt to his fans, in which Kurt praises a bunch of bands most people had never heard of (keep in mind that this was before the days of the internet, when discovering a new band was just a mouse-click away) and had this request to ask of his fans:

"If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of a different color, or women, please do this one favor for us - leave us the fuck alone! Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records."

It's been pointed out how ironic it is to ask someone to not buy your records after he's already bought it... otherwise the woman-hating racist never would have come across the liner notes inside the CD booklet. It's also interesting that Kurt doesn't request that the types of people he mention change their ways, just that they stop associating themselves with Nirvana.

Getting back to the song, it's impressive how different it sounds from the songs on Pablo Honey. It didn't take long for Radiohead to start finding their voice.

After the second verse, the song goes into a roaring, distortion-laden bridge which is repeated after the third verse. We can't hear anything except for the guitar - the vocals are muffled and the drums are drowned out. These noisy sections are enough to guarantee that this song will never be played on the radio, and that's probably what the band had in mind.

ALBUM REVIEW: This is technically not an album but an EP. I don't think bands today are even allowed to release EP's anymore. EP stands for Extended Play, which means that they are intended as a sort of glorified single. At eight songs, the My Iron Lung EP clocks in at a little over 28 minutes. Of course, I don't have the actual EP, just all the songs that were on the EP minus the acoustic version of Creep. To listen to the EP tonight, I had to play the song My Iron Lung off the disc containing the rest of The Bends before switching over to the bonus disc with the other My Iron Lung EP tracks. I didn't listen to them in the order that they appeared on the original EP, but tonight I'll put the songs into itunes and re-create the original sequencing.

The songs are more aggressive than I was expecting, and this is a good thing. Pablo Honey definitely sounds like an early 90's rock record, but this EP doesn't feel dated in the same way. The band was already creating their own little musical island. I wonder why the band stopped when they did; another two songs and this would have qualified as a full album. Maybe they just ran out of time and didn't want to slap together two more songs to fill it out, and they figured they'd get the songs they already finished out into the world before starting fresh on their next album, later to be known as The Bends.

This EP definitely deserves to be included in anyone's list of required Radiohead listening. True to form, this EP is satisfying enough to hold me over for a little while, but leaves me wanting more.