Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool

After reading this thread, then playing the album, then reading the rest of this thread... I think I like (current) Radiohead, but not Radiohead fans? Oof some of these opinions...

I dig how "Present Tense" sounds like a Gypsy Kings song.

pretty sure i like this album, thank you random mexican stream.

the last minute reminded me of that 'turn your lights on' track off of supernatural which i was forced to listen to at school coz it had 'smooth' on it

― And the cry rang out all o'er the town / Good Heavens! Tay is down (imago), Tuesday, May 10, 2016 3:53 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i can see how you came up with this but still lmao

to those of a certain age, that D-minor arpeggio is etched into our brains like a drop-D Days of the New riff, and nothing else compares.

Eye-wateringly poor review from The Independent, quotes first track as "This is a low-fi banker tax" and kicks on from there: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/reviews/radiohead-a-moon-shaped-pool-new-album-review-pleasure-and-despair-as-band-lets-themselves-be-a7020376.html

Couldn't get through that.

"Dear PR person,

I am reviewing ____________ for _______________ and I was hoping you could confirm a few of the album's lyrics for me. I think I have them right but I'd like to make sure before I print them."

WHY IS THAT SO FUCKING DIFFICULT????!!

I still think "Burn The Witch" is by far the lousiest song on this record, and it remains -- after two listens -- the only one I don't enjoy.

― Wimmels, Tuesday, 10 May 2016 20:51 (Yesterday)

Burn the Witch is one of the few tracks where you can hear a lot of 'string phenomena' going on, like the harsh attack of the plectrum and all of the percussion/atonality involved in that activity. also, there's a bounty of wild harmonic activity, presented very clearly.. as opposed to other tracks where the strings sound distant/epic/less macro

an album to make you feel, better

I know, WTF. You get the sense the writer is pleased with his cleverness, but it just goes "plonk".

I get the sense they've got no sub-editors or proof-readers.

or people with ears

Between the cosmic jazz piano, relatively straightforward rock groove, and the strings, 'The Numbers' really gives me a Spiritualized vibe.

― sam jax sax jam (Jordan),

Except not monumentally dull.

OTOH, Drowned in Sound nails it - http://drownedinsound.com/releases/19421/reviews/4150037

a sort of avant-garde MOR record

I like this description, but isn't this what Avalon is?

yeah, also a stereolab quote/summary

i feel like there's a certain weird strawman thing of using album covers to clean dope on, i feel like ppl say that a lot more than they do it

― rockpalast '82 (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, May 10, 2016 3:50 PM (54 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mostly agree with this, but I have a sleeve for Tom Waits' Frank's Wild Years that's missing the record and that's been my go-to weed-breaking tool for years now. I probably wouldn't use a sleeve of a record I care about to do this because, over time, it makes the inner gatefold kinda cruddy. And yeah, something a little overly romantic about actually breaking up weed on the record you're listening to at the time. Maybe this happened more in the 60s?

I still think "Burn The Witch" is by far the lousiest song on this record, and it remains -- after two listens -- the only one I don't enjoy.

― Wimmels, Tuesday, May 10, 2016 4:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i still haven't listened to this new radiohead album but i want to pop in and say i think that most weed nowadays does not need to be cleaned, shitty weed tangled w/ seeds and stems is less of a thing now than it used to be. it was definitely a ritual back in the day when we could only get shitty weed

"Can weed affect your opinion on the new Radiohead album?"

Sounds like a Vice story

It’s hard not to feel a bit like somebody's dad saying this

DiS bringing the ageism in perplexing new ways.

My Dad often goes around praising Nigel Godrich's production values to be fair.

The scope of a father's wisdom has clearly broadened over the years.

i have not listened to this yet since it is not on Spotify. so waiting...

You may be waiting a very long time.

tidal is a 30-day trial awayyyyy

yes, join us on the tidal thread. We are all keeping it cool over there.

I'm seeing a lot of people's reactions to the album include things about how 'Present Tense' isn't up to the rest of the record's standards, but I must respectfully disagree, as I find it to the album's most beautiful moment. It's an instance of emotional reprieve on an album that is sometimes so emotionally heavy, it nearly becomes too much. It feels like an honest to goodness love song with the repetition of "In you I'm lost" as the arrangement swells into the rewarding cadence.

Just top stuff.

"Can weed affect your opinion on the new Radiohead album?"

the last time i listened to a radiohead album was 16 years ago and i was so stoned and it made me like that album a lot.

"I quit smoking cigarettes recently and I've been making do with Gummi Bears, the patch, and tons of righteous weed. So between Kid A, Madonna, and that new Doves album, I've been enjoying a summer of love in my mind. The Doves' mantras of desolation are even trippier than the first couple Cranes records (though maybe not as lysergic as prime Swans or Ravens), Madonna's new one makes the 13th Floor Elevators sound like the Weavers, and Kid A doesn't have a thought in its head, always a plus with stoner rock."

http://www.villagevoice.com/music/snowplow-you-bad-elephant-6416843

xp 'Present Tense' is the best song. Think Moka also singled it out as a highlight. Made Karl Malone's top 4 (i.e. it was his #4).

i do like present tense, but i mainly just posted that so i could come back and laugh at it in a few years. my early reactions to radiohead albums are usually way different than how i eventually come to terms. a few years ago i found an old high school notebook from when Kid A came out, and i wrote a little about what i thought about it after the first listen. i think i singled out optimistic as the best song and said that the title track was the worst. now the title track is like an all-time top 10 radiohead track for me.

speaking of high school and radiohead, this brought me back:

Their popularity took root amongst the first wave of internet users, back when the web was more anarchic and undefined, and used primarily by people who felt alienated enough to sit in front of an ugly monitor and post under a pseudonym when almost nobody else was doing it.

it's easy to roll your eyes at broad caricatures like that, but that was definitely me. radiohead meant a lot to me when i was growing up, but the community on their message board meant just as much. but anyway, strange and slightly unsettling to read an article that seems like a short history of your old neighborhood.

"burn the witch" is very emblematic of what radiohead does well at their best, taking elements of more avant garde music (steve reich in this case) and applying it to a more pop song format for a different audience and making it sound organic

Which Reich piece does it recall for you?

I wonder if it's simply just the pulses section from the front of MF18M.

So, I've heard this record and whoever said it "feels like a final record" seems to be spot on. I can't think of where else the band could possibly go after this.

some of the piano moments from 'Daydreaming' and 'True Love Waits' feel more 18 Musician-y moments to me.

btw i have to share this conspiracy-ish close reading of the PTA video that a friend emailed me:
FYI: In the the new Daydreaming video, Thom walks through 23 doors. Last August his relationship ended after 23 years. And when he was making the song, he was 46 and if you speed up and play backward the weird noises at the end of Daydreaming, he sings “Half of our lives.”

i think all of the talk about AMSP being all about their breakup is a bit overblown (especially as so many of the songs were written pre-breakup), but i don't think it's conspiracy-ish to think the 'half of our lives' bit directly references the relationship.

i guess everyone experiences a terrible breakup in their own way, but when i went through my own a few years ago the immediate and lasting feeling was of stepping off of a train in some unknown location, all alone, wondering how you even got there. the wandering through doors in the video, ending with stumbling out into a snowy mountain scene, captures that feeling so beautifully.

"so, I've heard this record and whoever said it "feels like a final record" seems to be spot on. I can't think of where else the band could possibly go after this.
― But... could you imagine a formation in your lemonade? Ho! (Turrican), Thursday, 12 May 2016 20:48 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink"

I hope they go full throttle heavy/hard rock/electro/dub supernova

beautifully said Karl.

i get what people are saying with the 'final album' thing, with the old material and elegiac feel, but i have no problem imagining them making...another Radiohead album.

I hope they go full throttle heavy/hard rock/electro/dub supernova

isn't that Muse? idk, i heard one song like 13 years ago.

That is basically it

Radiohead should become a smiths cover band

get knopfler in the studio with Becker. Go full Gaucho.

I don't know, for some reason it kinda feels to me that Radiohead have explored every possible avenue of what they can do, and if they continued making records from this point onwards, they'd be very comfortably "Radiohead" records. I mean, folks are already saying it about this one: "It sounds like Radiohead making a Radiohead album" ...

Who is saying that, and what other Radiohead album does this sound much at all like?

yeah there are a million avenues they could explore as far as I know. feels like they're only just getting started after posing around for the best part of two decades

*pissing

Oh come on, this is hardly some Kid A-style switch up. It's every crotchet a Radiohead record.

is anyone denying that?

AMSP is a rupture in time and space, and more importantly, in radiohead history

it has all the hallmarks of Radiohead bit there hasn't been a Radiohead album that sounds like it. you couldn't accuse them of repeating themselves with this one.
to me it feels like, if Pablo Honey was nursery school and TKOL was their university thesis, this is kind of their first job, I.e. putting what they've learnt into practice.

Obv a better analogy would be Pablo honey - nursery school, ... the bends - primary school and fun in the playground, ... ok comp - secondary / high school, puberty, the prom, etc, -- kid a/amnesiac - college freshman stoner days, maybe even some activism! ... hail to the thief - disenchanted grad school, contributor for the college newspaper ... In rainbows, got lucky and landed a solid entry level job ... Tkol, economy in the shitter, back to school for a phd ... A moon shaped pool, post-doc fellowship work, also self produced a documentary film about homelesness or something

yall need to stop going to so much college