Pitchfork

CH-CHUNK. CH-CHUNK. When Radiohead burst into British and American living rooms in 1993 with their now infamous ode to alienation, "Creep", it was only Jonny Greenwood's frenetic guitar stabs that hinted at the inspired musical legacy of the band that would soon follow. They were two jagged electric spasms of sonic sledge that not only foreshadowed the majesty of the anthemic guitar-drenched chorus to come, but also marvelously served to heighten the emotional content of the song; in this case, the unbearable and mounting anger of the self-defeated and alienated. It was with those two bursts of distorted beauty that Jonny Greenwood scripted himself into the vocabulary of rock, and left his first mark on music history.

It's no shock that Greenwood would become the first member of Radiohead to release solo work. Anyone who's witnessed the band's meticulous career-spanning live show could see that the Jonny Greenwood of 2003 is far more peripatetic than his early 90s counterpart. On stage, Greenwood jeers back and forth, alternating between crouching in front of his varied arsenal of effects (which includes a transistor radio, a vintage patchbay, a laptop, and a number of guitar pedals), to gently lilting in front of his Ondes-Martenot, to heroically pounding notes out of his trademark telecaster. Greenwood is the consummate rock multi-instrumentalist, and the music he has composed for Bodysong perfectly reflects this heterogeneous ambition.

If Radiohead's Hail to the Thief suffered from being too scatterbrained, Greenwood's Bodysong-- composed for the nominal British documentary which details the "experience of being human"-- strikes a perfect balance, channeling all his diverse influences into a single multifarious recording. The album's opener, "Moon Trills", marries pensive and melancholy piano chords reminiscent of Radiohead's "Pyramid Song" with swarming frenetic string swells, and weepy Ondes-Martenot accompaniment suggestive of the late French composer Olivier Messiaen's Ondes pieces, while "Splatter" comfortably melds together a frenzied Charles Mingus-inspired bass riff, a DJ Shadow-esque funk break, and Ornette Coleman-styled horn blurts.

The movements that comprise Bodysong, despite having their own specific sonic identities, also possess an overwhelmingly organic presence; they seem to bleed into and alter one another. The meditative twilight of "Moon Trills", and its minute-long epilogue "Moon Mall", gives birth to the insistent reversed hi-hat loop which makes up "Trench". The polyrhythmic chaotic clatter of "Convergence", meanwhile, gives way to the casual bop of "Nudnik Headache", with its lazy drunken drum break, and queasy piano loop.

The only aspect of Bodysong that's somewhat disappointing is the inconspicuous lack of guitar work. While guitars do show up on two of the tracks (the dubbed-out hallucinatory "Clockwork Tin Soldiers" and the fractured gloom of "24 Hour Charleston"), most of Bodysong is made up of lushly ambient strings courtesy of The Emperor Quartet, and elaborate webs of percussion. This fact may be of little surprise given that Radiohead themselves have infamously eschewed guitars in favor of other musical approaches. However, those majestic guitar stabs still linger on: They're in the rolling electric fog of "Clockwork Tin Soldiers", the disjointed electronic pings of "Moon Mall", the frantically wailing horns of "Splitter", and the uneasy midnight shuffle of "Nudnik Headache". You just have to listen more closely to find them.