Amanda Palmer Performs the Popular Hits of Radiohead

Former frontwoman of the Dresden Dolls and now  consummate e-queen and twitter nut, Amanda Palmer has tucked her ukelele under one arm and dedicated an album to the hits of Radiohead. With seven tracks spanning Pablo Honey to Kid A, and as a nearly free download, Palmer has followed in Radiohead's innovative release footsteps.

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It's absolutely not a big call to claim that Radiohead are one of the most unique and important recording artists of our time. From the revolutionary OK Computer, to the doubly revolutionary Kid A, Radiohead led the way in an evolution and experimentation of sound that spent so much time crossing the borders of various genres that they resembled a panicked diplomat. Then in 2007, came a move that had the potential to change the way the music industry thought about the way it delivered records to the public. Marketed only with Johnny Greenwood's short message  of "Well, the new album is finished, and it's coming out in 10 days . . . We've called it In Rainbows," they shocked the music community by releasing it as a digital download only and asked you to pay whatever you wanted for it. So much for 'no alarms and no surprises.' Of course, the kicker was in creating a limited $100 box set of memorabilia and hard copies of the album which their rabid, obsessive fanbase quickly jumped upon to offset the 30 cent purchasers of the album, and thus, it was thought that the music industry would be forever changed.

In the three years since though, it's still operating much the same, and everyone's still complaining about it. Big albums get leaked and downloaded for free, the labels are missing out, the artists are confused about what to do about it and Radiohead's supposedly revolutionary step has been rarely repeated to a fraction of the success. So then, it's fitting that one of Twitter's most popular music personalities in Amanda Palmer would use that great big machine of information to not only imitate Radiohead's 'pay what you want' philosophy, but cover a half dozen of their most popular hits under the humourously verbose title of 'Amanda Palmer Performs the Popular Hits of Radiohead on Her Magical Ukelele.' 

Just as Radiohead did in 2007, the download is as good as free (US$0.87 minimum) unless you're after goods such as a ukelele painted by Amanda Palmer, a limited edition vinyl, a t-shirt, a button, or an iPhone accompanied by a phone call from Palmer for 1,000 smackeroos. True story. Palmer has delivered a marketing feat in doing everything herself at minimal cost and offering what her obscenely huge fan base wants; a personal touch from someone they hear from hundreds of times a week in short 140 character messages. Oh and yeah; underneath all that, there's actually an album of songs!

Palmer's album cover (or jpeg for those in the digital age) takes a cue from half the records you see tilted in an op-shop milk crate with titles like 'Betty Housewife Sings the Songs of Bing Crosby,' posing on a blue background with a ukelele with 50's themed textual accompaniments. The humour in the whole idea of the thing is evident from the get-go. The retro throwback of the title and cover is amusingly at odds with the fact that this whole thing is being released on the internet or on a telephone that enables you to watch porn on the go, held in your unused palm. It's a bizarre kind of release, supported by the fact that the twisted electronic antics of Radiohead are being reimagined on a ukelele, by a pseudo-cabaret artist no less. So if this album achieves anything at all, it's to demonstrate how screwed up the 21st century is.

With all that said, we haven't even began to speak about a single note of music, and that's not surprising, since interest in this album comes in the excitement and hype of everything surrounding the clever gimmicks rather than the music itself. The album is 7 tracks long, covering 6 Radiohead tracks from Pablo Honey, The Bends, OK Computer and Kid A. The selections aren't especially unique and the arrangements aren't reinventing the songs at all, but it does exist as an interesting listen. Amanda Palmer's voice and her Ukelele seem to have some kind of bond that completely justifies her obsession with the instrument, and the covers suceed as a result. 

Idioteque is by far the most interesting track on the album, maybe because it's the most dissimilar to the original out of the other almost note-for-note covers. Exit Music (For a Film) is also treated kindly by Palmer's haunting voice succeeding in the same place that Thom Yorke's did, while Creep is actually made stomachable again after the years of overplaying it has suffered at the hands of commercial radio. All-in-all, it's not too bad. You'd be hard pressed to give it a bad review, but even the most ardent Amanda Palmer fan has to admit that there's not a whole lot going on here. It's kind of painful to think that an album which made Palmer $15,000 in the first three minutes of its release is a cover album with barely a twinge of variance from the originals whilst there are bands slaving away for months on original songs to make $15,000 in total, but that's just the way of the world these days.

If you're an Amanda Palmer fan and are curious at all about this album, you might as well get it, you can spare 87 cents, but don't expect to get blown away by anything other than the novelty factor associated with an album released in a quirky manner. If you were buying this album for the music, you'd head out and get the Best of Radiohead, but since this is an interesting and strange release, you can pick it up for the quirks alone from the comfort of your own desk chair. 

'Amanda Palmer Performs the Popular Hits of Radiohead on Her Magical Ukelele' is available now from her website.