Trying to find the center of Amnesiac is a tricky business. By “the center,” I mean the point at which all the various moods and movements of an album intersect; the song that sounds most representative of the album. It’s not always the best song (to use the inevitable Pink Floyd comparison: “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” is pretty unarguably the center of Wish You Were Here, but the title track is a much better song; so’s “Have a Cigar,” for that matter), though it seems to work out that way fairly often. I wish that the center of Amnesiac were the album’s first song, “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box”; one could look at it as a simple alienation parable if it were. But “Packt Like Sardines” is a spark from the fire at the album’s center, where things are pretty damned scary. I wouldn’t mind, either, if the center were “Knives Out”; then the song’s heart, which is awful and ugly, might be a little more bearable. But “Knives Out,” which I fear having to examine any more closely than I have to even though it’s the next one in line, is a sunken pit within the overall roadmap of the album: it is not the center, but the great and terrible dead end. How an album -- how any effort -- can survive its own depths is the very miracle of creation itself, and is why so many great works seek out the dark places within once-bright things. |
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