A friend of mine recently encountered a man muttering to himself on a Brooklyn subway car. Over and over, the man repeated, "This should take care of it. This is all I have. I'll never be able to pay it back...it's Monday" (it wasn't). I joked that this was just one of the cryptic lyrical fragments that decorate Radiohead's recent sleeves: the desperation, the vague sense of threat, and the compulsive and cowed attempt to conform to owed and expected behavior were close enough to those fragments' tone to make the joke less funny than I'd hoped. And as if in some asynchronic, subatomic homage, the title of the first track on Amnesiac might describe that man's immediate physical situation, "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box." With a pressurized percussion track like BBs hurtling about in a heated tin can and lyrics consisting almost entirely of the lines "I'm a reasonable man - get off my case," it may well depict the same man in the subway car, a moment after his desperation turns to coiled resistance and a moment before that tension-wound resistance explodes. As you probably know by now, the songs on Amnesiac were recorded together with the recordings that made up Kid A, whose tracks were selected to make as cohesive and forward-looking an album as Radiohead could muster. The early buzz was that Amnesiac would feature a return to the more guitar-based music characteristic of The Bends. Rumors of the death of Radiohead's electronics jones have been exaggerated, however: while most tracks are recognizably songs, only a few are guitar-based, and a couple are almost purely electronic sound explorations, such as the rotating knives and synthesized vocal nightmare of "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" or the backwards noises, whirling tubes, and riled-snake-in-a-box percussion of "Like Spinning Plates." What's surprising is that Radiohead here unfold some more unexpected stylistic wrinkles, including two tracks - "Dollars & Cents" and "Knives Out" - that surprisingly suggest that various Brazilian artists reside on Radiohead's listening list alongside Autechre and Aphex Twin, Charles Mingus, and classical composers Olivier Messiaen and Krzysztof Penderecki. Just imagine "Knives Out" rearranged for two acoustic guitars and some percussion - the rhythm's almost there already (although as far as I know, few sambas are about cannibalism). Stranger yet is the album's closing track "Life in a Glasshouse," which sounds like a suicide note from a New Orleans street band and features 80-year-old British jazz player Humphrey Lyttelton on trumpet. What remains most admirable about Radiohead is that even in the wake of their huge success (as I write, this album is number 8 on the charts: it boggles my mind that nearly the same number of people are listening to this record as are nodding off to Destiny's Child), the band continues to explore a huge variety of styles and arrangement while consciously remaining largely within a song-based format - and still manage to emerge sounding exactly like themselves. Far from being a motley collection of lukewarm Kid A leftovers, the songs that make up Amnesiac demonstrate that Radiohead has hit one of those streaks only a few bands can manage, like Barry Bonds' home run stroke this season, in which almost every attempt succeeds effortlessly.

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