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.