Happy Thanksgiving from the Radiohead Tourment

Happy Thanksgiving from the Radiohead tournament.

We are in no ways drunk.

-- Brad and Bryan

It's up

Thanks for waiting.

There were some bumps along the way, but the bracket is finally up.

The good news is that for that wait, the bracket is completely awesome. It's time to start voting. Voting in the first round will run through December 15th. There are 32 matchups to choose from.

We'll update this blog as we flesh out the schedule from here on out, but for now, enjoy voting.

Thanks again,

Brad and Bryan

Click here to vote

We shall return

... tomorrow, with more Radiohead goodness, and begin anew our march to the tournament. If you've submitted a ballot to us over email, get ready to see it here.

We would apologize for our deliquency but we were at the beach and, as such, do not apologize.

All Points West, Tweeter Center and the actual tournament

So you may have noticed that there haven't been many posts here lately. We've been crossing the American northeast and midwest, and tomorrow we'll head off again, this time eastward to Wednesday night's show at the Tweeter Center in Massachusetts. This is actually where we saw our first-ever concert, but we're not going to say who it was. Ever.

When we get back, we'll start moving toward the actual tournament with some e-mail blasts, some reader-generated lists and whatever else. We actually missed last weekend's All Points West shows in New Jersey because we were in Chicago, but there's Thom, right there in the upper-right hand corner.

Akron, OH... Radiohead country?

We're not from Akron, Ohio — our city has far more Empire State Buildings in it — but we were there this weekend for a Greek lamb roast. It was delicious, and the best part was seeing our Greek friend who's all about the mysticism of life. Put it bluntly, he loves coincidences. He turned a chance meeting with a guy from Michigan at an airport bar into a $2,000 profit. How? He bet on the Detroit Pistons because of the meeting, and they won the NBA Championship. Put simply, he has a lust for life.

So we were catching up this weekend, and we told him about our site, and how we're up to more than 2,500 votes, and he loved it; fine and dandy. But where were our coincidences? We were outside a restaurant at the time, and the five of us went into eat and were shown to an outdoor table. Akron has these nice things we don't have here — let's call'em "stars" — and we sat under them to order on a pitch-perfect night when I noticed that a live version of Fake Plastic Trees was playing. Spooky? Sure. But here were the next 19 songs to come on:

High and Dry
Just
My Iron Lung
Black Star
Street Spirit (skipped through)
Idioteque
Airbag
Subterranean Homesick Alien (skipped through)
Exit Music (skipped through)
Let Down
Karma Police
No Surprises (skipped through)
Lucky
The Tourist
Everything in its Right Place (skipped through)
Kid A
The National Anthem (skipped through)
How to Disappear Completely (skipped through)
Optimistic

We left before they could get to Amnesiac.

So yeah... Akron, Ohio.

Your votes vs. our album poll, by the numbers

As you may have noticed, we have a new poll on the site — What's your favorite song on the Bends? Now's a good time to look back at our last poll. We asked you for your favorite album, and you responded:

1% Pablo Honey
7% The Bends
34% OK Computer
31% Kid A
8% Amnesiac
7% Hail to the Thief
13% In Rainbows

These results aren't that surprising. It's a testament to the absurdity of Radiohead that the Bends checks in at 7 percent, but other that that, this looks about right. If we had ended the poll a week ago, Kid A would have been number one, but OKC made a comeback, as number one albums of decades are wont to do.

One thing I was interested in, though, was how the album poll results squared with your Top 10 votes. I took the average number of votes for each album's songs and caculated each one as a percentage of the total album vote (In Rainbows Bonus Disc and B-Sides not included). Here were the results:

2% Pablo Honey
12% The Bends
25% OK Computer
22% Kid A
12% Amnesiac
10% Hail to the Thief
17% In Rainbows

These numbers are closer together, which is not surprising either. One thing Radiohead has done is create a music catalog where there are few, if any, throwaway songs; these albums register closer in quality when you consider them song-by-song than as a whole. One-third of our readers prefer OKC to the rest of the bunch, but it has received only 25 percent of the vote. That's not a mark against our ranking system: it's shows that no matter how great the songs are on an album, there's a separate quality that makes a great album great that OK Computer and Kid A have in abundance, and that the others don't. They still have some of the greatest rock songs ever recorded and 35% of our album poll votes; nice work if you can get it.

What's your No. 1?

So we've done a lot of ranking over here at the Radiohead Tournament. Here's the most important question: What's your No. 1 song? What song do you love above all others? And why?

Send along your answers/essays/treatises to radioheadtournament [at] gmail.com. We're looking forward to'em.