Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide

Pablo Honey in no way was adequate preparation for its epic, sprawling follow-up, The Bends. Building from the sweeping, three-guitar attack that punctuated the best moments of Pablo Honey, Radiohead create a grand and forceful sound that nevertheless resonates with anguish and despair — it's cerebral anthemic rock. Occasionally, the album displays its influences, whether it's U2, Pink Floyd, R.E.M. or the Pixies, but Radiohead turn clichés inside out, making each song sound bracingly fresh. Thom Yorke's tortured lyrics give the album a melancholy undercurrent, as does the surging, textured music. But what makes The Bends so remarkable is that it marries such ambitious, and often challenging, instrumental soundscapes to songs that are at their cores hauntingly melodic and accessible. It makes the record compelling upon first listen, but it reveals new details with each listen, and soon it becomes apparent that with The Bends, Radiohead have reinvented anthemic rock.

Nick Heil, Amazon.com

While Radiohead saw its stock rising in 1994, it wasn't until 1995's The Bends that it really became a blue chip band. And for good reason. The quintet honed its talent for bombastic Brit Rock, yet still preserved an edge of unpredictability. Even singles like the title track didn't give in to the kind of swooning guitar clichés usually embraced by commercial radio. If the CD proved anything, it was that Radiohead could find solid ground between pop experimentation and the tradition of born-in-the-bone, balls-out rock.

Robert Burrow, Amazon.co.uk

After the massive success of Pablo Honey--or, more specifically, the single "Creep"--had made them a household name, most had written Radiohead off as one-hit wonders. That they could return with an album as awesome and monumental as The Bends, therefore, must have been particularly unexpected. Not that Pablo Honey is a bad album, but rather, when compared to the epic grandeur of The Bends, it's obvious that the five Oxford-based boys had matured immensely since the release of their debut. "High And Dry", "Just", "Street Spirit", "Fake Plastic Trees": nary a pop song among them, yet it's testament to their greatness that they all were hit singles. And really, it's easy to see why: Thom Yorke's falsetto crying over a wall of acoustic and electric guitars, as lyrics and music blend to create a masterpiece of melancholy beauty. The Bends is one of the most essential albums of the 1990s, and a spectacular indicator of further greatness to come.

David Sprague, Barnes & Noble

Two years before breaking into America in a big way with the weighty OK COMPUTER, this British quintet forged a quiet triumph with this melancholy medley of melodrama. Propelled by front man Thom Yorke's disconsolate delivery (not to mention his decidedly doomy lyrics), the album zigzags through the listener's consciousness, leaving a lingering unease -- and a desire for more. Yorke is at his best when pondering his own inadequacies, which he does with uncommon honesty on tracks like "Bullet Proof" and "My Iron Lung." His bandmates -- particularly guitarists Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien -- wrap Yorke's tales in deceptively complex melodies that split the difference between prog-rock grandiosity and gloom-pop ennui. A low-key gem.

Radiohead: Thom Yorke (vocals, guitar, piano); Ed O'Brien (vocals, guitar); Jon Greenwood (guitar, recorder, piano, organ, synthesizer); Colin Greenwood (bass); Phil Selway (drums).

Additional personnel: John Matthias (violin, viola); Caroline Lavelle (cello).
Producers: John Leckie, Radiohead, Jim Warren, Nigel Godrich.
Engineers include: John Leckie, Nigel Godrich, Chris Brown.
Recorded at Rak, The Manor and Abbey Road, London, England.

On only their second outing Oxford's Radiohead fulfilled their huge potential, fashioning an album whose relentlessly downbeat tone was offset by an ability to formulate consistently winning melodies. The title track and "Just" throw some customary rock poses, but for the most part the band displayed a far more expansive approach. Thom Yorke emerged from the woodwork with a new-found vocal confidence, revealing a striking falsetto on two of the album's strongest tracks, "Fake Plastic Trees" and "High & Dry." The last three songs build inexorably to the stunning emotional climax of "Street Spirit (Fade Out)" with a control and poise that showcased the band's new maturity.

CMJ New Music Report, issue 420, March 27, 1995

Radiohead follows up on the success of 1993's Pablo Honey (which featured the runaway hit "Creep") with The Bends, another fine example of the band's ability to combine a diversity of musical styles into one highly listenable collection. The Bends also reveals Radiohead's penchant for Euro-influenced rock right from the opener, "Planet Telex," which capably twirls simple U2 themes with `60s psychedelia and then adds a dark, sopping mass of distorted guitars. "Fake Plastic Trees," while somewhat calculated in its arrangement, is about as radio-friendly as you can get, starting with a light, memorable melody draped atop an acoustic guitar and concluding with a progression of plaintive strings, mellow organ and lofty drums. While The Bends sometimes secures a bit of its sound from studio effects (check out the marvelous left-right tremolo on "Bones"), they're never used as a replacement for artistic substance, but rather to add flavor and contrast to the mix. Other easily digestible tracks: the Beatlesish "Just (You Do It To Yourself)" and the Hendrixian-riffed "My Iron Lung."

Simon P. Ward, DOT Music

Radiohead's debut album 'Pablo Honey' was something of a curate's egg - parts of it were superb, others tended to sound like indie filler. With 'Creep' still shackled firmly around their scrawny necks, the singles that preceded this second album suggested a radical change of direction.

The windswept 'Planet Telex' is the first sign that things are different now in Radiohead's world. A spacey, guitar-heavy epic with Thom Yorke sneering over the top - this most definitely ain't average indie anymore. The crashing opening to 'The Bends' proves that, with the monstrous guitars bursting out of the speakers.

The pairing of the ballads 'High And Dry' and 'Fake Plastic Trees' together allows the gentle songs to complement each other. Lyrically, they are polar opposites.

The former satirises a vain and facetious man ("Two jumps in a week/I bet you think that's pretty clever don't you boy") who ultimately is losing what matters ("The best thing that you had has gone away") as the slow, acoustic accompaniment gives way to a harder sound.

Meanwhile, the latter is an attack on consumer culture and the homogenisation of everyday life to the point where even the other character in the song is my "Fake plastic baby". Yorke's lyrical shift from the personal subjects of their debut to the more universal themes here gives the songs more weight, rather than sounding like teenage bedroom traumas.

'Bones' is another transcendental rocker, with Yorke on particularly spiteful form on the chorus. It's excellently contrasted by the lullaby beginning of 'Nice Dream', before that too mutates into a fiery ball of guitars.

'Just' is possessed of another worldweary outlook "You do it to yourself, you do" while 'My Iron Lung' tries to throw the albatross of 'Creep' off the band's shoulders in a mid-section maelstrom of guitars that sounds like Nirvana's 'Heart-Shaped Box'.

However, the real highlight of the second half of the album is 'Bulletproof'. Sounding like a lullaby set in space, its subtlety provides an ethereal volte-face away from the rock bombast. Closing track 'Street Spirit (Fade Out)' is an acoustic ballad, with some spellbinding guitar work laying the foundation for another examination of the pressures of success - "This machinery bearing down on me".

The dull 'Black Star' aside, this is a magnificent collection of songs that flow together as a seamless whole, with some much going on in the details. Pallid indie wannabes? Not any more. Welcome to the first record of the rest of Radiohead's life.

David Roberts, Q Magazine

Of all the recent indie-rock second-comings, from Suede to The Stone Roses, the second LP from this Oxford five-piece could prove to be the most significant. Shunned by a fickle music press after releasing their debut Pablo Honey album in February 1993, Radiohead quietly and determindly went about their business, touring non-stop in America and ultimately shifting a stunning one milllion albums worldwide. If the spotlight is bound to be more focused for this release, everything about The Bends is well up to scrutiny. It's a powerful, bruised, majestically desperate record of frighteningly good songs. Singer Thom Yorke's vocal mix of weary angst and strained bewilderment remains bewitching, while the charismatic, shuddering musical storm brewed up by his band is often intoxicating. They haul their emotions across a musical wrack which stretches from the scorched thunder of Just and Planet Telex to the deadly, gripping delicacy of Nice Dream and High And Dry.

Gavin Edwards, RollingStone, issue 919, April 3, 2003

Fans of Radiohead's 1993 single "Creep" basically divided into two camps: those who loved it as a dynamic slice of self-loathing rock & roll, and those who just enjoyed the skrakunk-skrakunk guitar distortion before every chorus. On their later albums, Radiohead would throw their lot in with the skrakunk-skrakunk crowd, pushing the boundaries of sonic experimentation. But for one record, they demonstrated how good they could be when they stuck to guitar rock. Singer Thom Yorke explored the expressive power of moaning, while guitarist Jonny Greenwood proved equally gifted with restrained strumming and electric flare-gun solos. When critics describe bands such as Coldplay as sounding like Radiohead, they usually mean that they sound like Radiohead's brilliant second album.
The title of The Bends refers to decompression sickness, when deep-sea divers come up too quickly -- a comment on the band's sudden fame. The lyrics are filled with Yorke's unhappiness rendered as health metaphors: He makes himself a cripple who can't climb the stairs in "Bones," and with "My Iron Lung," he immobilizes himself even more completely and complains, "This is our new song/Just like the last one/A total waste of time."

The record is filled with lovely ballads, full of longing, jealousy and critiques of consumer culture. But the best is the last: "Street Spirit (Fade Out)." Over chiming guitar arpeggios, Yorke sings a hymn to his own claustrophobia and insignificance, making them sound like exalted states of being. When he intones, "Cracked eggs, dead birds scream as they fight for life," he finds solace in the vowels, transforming them into a melody of hope. By the end of the song, with harmonies swirling around, the beauty has touched even him: The final words on an emotional, bleak album are "Immerse your soul in love."

© Frank Steven Groen