| O good people, turn away and run, because you are being set up. “Dollars and Cents,” the least interesting and in many ways the most pleasant song on Amnesiac (and also, by three seconds, the longest), is a malevolent palate cleanser. Cynics might want to argue that it’s just “filler,” but what follows it -- a gorgeous, spare, two-string electric guitar meditation without lyrics that’s only two minutes long -- leaves no doubt that they are doing this on purpose. It’s an island of normalcy: a song whose meaning is easy to parse, whose music holds no surprises except for a really, really scary noise that crescendos in at about the halfway mark, whose place in the world is secure. “Dollars and Cents” and the instrumental that follows it (it’s called “Hunting Bears”) are the straight men for the murderer who is waiting in the wings. “Dollars and Cents” rises to a climax and ebbs away from it, good stuff all right but not great Radiohead by any measure, and certainly not great by Amnesiac’s quite high standard, and then “Hunting Bears” spends two meditative minutes exploring a couple of mournful minor-key phrases on an electric guitar, and we feel peaceful in a way we haven’t since before we began our walk through the album’s dark corners and lonely rooms. |