While you make pretty speeches, I'm being cut to threads

The other day I finally bought the fancy pants headphones I've been wanting for Declan and they dutifully arrived from Mr. Amazon on Saturday. Somehow, I felt they might change my life. Maybe I had not really been hearing music the way I should. Maybe things would sound completely different.

But actually things sounded pretty much the same - just more intricate.

The new headphones let me hear clicks and sighs, switches and breaths. The music sounds a little more organic. I can hear the people behind the tunes.

It took probably the most inorganic piece of music I own to help me realize that. Today's album, Amnesiac by Radiohead, can sometimes sound like it was made without human involvement at all. I don't know what goes on in the mind of Thom Yorke but it seems like a dark place where computers rule the Earth.

I've been a huge Radiohead fan for years but I have to say they lost me a little with the releases of Kid A and Amnesiac. Where they making crazy music just to see if the critics would still think it was genius? I don't know. All I know is that is always strange and often unlistenable.

So today was interesting. As I listened to Amnesiac with my new headphones, I got it a little. The sound was beautiful. There where whirrs behind my left eye and chimes in my right ear. Noises traveled around and Thom's haunting voice filled the spaces in between. Nowadays critics call it groundbreaking but what I really think they mean is "trippy."

So while Amnesiac will continue to be toward the bottom of the list of my favorite Radiohead albums, I will give it some credit. I'll be sure to bust it out when I want to take advantage of the full spectrum of stereo fun that my headphones can provide, and also when I want to feel trippy.