Radiohead: A Moon Shaped POLL

I can't pick favourites from this.

i can, it's "glass eyes"

Can’t really pick a song which would define this one for me.

try "glass eyes"

not until my real eyes stop working!!

"But there's still a lot going on in there. It's incredibly detailed, possibly their most delicate and intricate album; one that deserves "deeper listening" more than any of the others"

Dont think anyone could argue otherwise. The question is whether theres something bigger than those craft based details, for me at least. But maybe a melancholy bath type of album is the kind of thing they should be making almost 30 years in.

I feel like I’m in an island when I say I’d rank TKOL in their top 5. Disclaimer: I count Staircase and Supercollider as part of TKOL to make it a 10 track album.

No no this is otm

Love Moon Shaped Pool also, top to bottom. "Burn The Witch" works right where it's at.

Lol voodoo.

Tbh the one I like the most is “The Numbers” because it does sound like some sort of spiritual jazz number but it also has a sort of hippie-ish 60s folk groove going on. It’s sort of unique for Radiohead imho. But I wouldn’t call it the song that best defines the album, it’s just my favorite one.

Decks Dark - you know, it's that one
Desert Island Disk - the one in 7
Ful Stop - the uptempo one in 6, kinda motorik, kinda breakbeat-y in that way they do
Glass Eyes - the super pretty vocals/piano/strings one
Identikit - the one with the incredible bridge and guitar solo
The Numbers - as stated the spiritual hat intro with a really strong string outro
Present Tense - Radiohead do samba
Tinker Tailor - sounds like it could be on the back half of In Rainbows, until the incredible strings start coming in halfway through
True Love Waits - you know

Decks Dark is the only one without some sort of distinguishing gimmick or big moment to me, but it's the exception that proves the rule, sets the tone after the opening tracks

The super lowkey rhythm on this is extremely funky, that plus the menacing groove and oneiric lyric makes it my favourite I think.

XP “decks dark” has that fantastic choral/orchestral section early on that you’d think sticks around for the entire song but drops out pretty quickly

Decks Dark might be my favourite actually - a spiritual sequal to Subterranean Homesick Alien. After the tension of the choral section, the relief of the refrain, but with added suprisingly funky bass licks. Then the smokey, subtly menacing coda - "when you've had enough of me".

I always get Glass Eyes and Desert Island Disk mixed up.

i enjoy this album but am unable to associate a name to many tracks,

Exactly how I am with it. I can recall only tracks 1, 2, and 11 from memory, though I still like the album more than any since Amnesiac

Amnesiac fan cannot recall

It's a clichéd thing to say, but OKC literally changed my life. It will always be my favourite.

― pomenitul, Monday, 8 March 2021 17:50 (six days ago) link

How so?? It was obviously an incredible achievement and a very advanced 'classic rock' kind of record in a moment when the genre tended toward the four-square. Like, I can understand "OKC never left my CD player for a year", just have a hard time wrapping my head around "OKC changed my life". I guess my main criticism of OKC has always been that it's so very good at being a rock album, it does all the things you'd expect "good music" to do, it doesn't really push me to shift my understanding of this in any way, it meets me on my own turf iykwim

I remember it as the most instant of classics, possibly for that reason.

Surprised at Burn The Witch getting so much love but maybe because it's the most distinctive? Always heard it as being too much in debt to Owen Pallett's album from a few years before to count as a classic Radiohead song

I think I'd still vote for Daydreaming. It's a microcosm of what's to come and the slumbered vibe was exactly what I wanted to hear after TKOL's twiggy frenetics

Cut "Burn The Witch," add "Ill Wind" where it falls alphabetically, and this is definitely my favorite Radiohead album. Certainly the one I'm likely to put on these last few years.

How so?? It was obviously an incredible achievement and a very advanced 'classic rock' kind of record in a moment when the genre tended toward the four-square. Like, I can understand "OKC never left my CD player for a year", just have a hard time wrapping my head around "OKC changed my life". I guess my main criticism of OKC has always been that it's so very good at being a rock album, it does all the things you'd expect "good music" to do, it doesn't really push me to shift my understanding of this in any way, it meets me on my own turf iykwim

It wasn't for me, but I can 100% imagine OKC being a teenaged listener's first exposure to a more ambitious and experimental strain of rock.

I was thinking "ambitious" is one of the boxes it checks.

I could see it at the center of a rich and diverse musical orbit for sure tho.

I can picture it being a fissure into an intoxicating parallel musical universe from the perspective of, say, a 13 year old indie/britpop fan in 97.

I don't know what pom meant exactly but an album can make a statement or evocation that impacts someone's life without needing to be aesthetically revolutionary.

i'm a big "burn the witch" fan in the context of it's placement. its drive bears nothing with the rest of the album and the misdirection works as the opener. sequenced anywhere else on the album and it would be jarring.

xp right, pomenitul did not say "Okc challenged me and expanded my horizons", I've just failed to articulate why it surprises me. It doesn't matter tho, I was just curious as to what was meant.

Deflatormouse, I was 12 when it came out and my musical diet mostly consisted of alt rock. 'Paranoid Android' in particular, whose unsettling music video was a staple of Musique Plus aka Quebec's MTV, felt taut yet winding in a way I did not think possible at the time, so I picked up the album as soon as I could – half a year later, if memory serves, by which point I had already acquainted myself with 'Karma Police', which I loved just as much. Upon hearing OK Computer in its entirety, I was impressed with the diversity of sounds they managed to coax out of the rock idiom, which felt extremely innovative in 1997-1998, just as I was getting into so-called 'electronica'.

But the key moment for me was a close listening session via headphones rather than on the shitty boombox I owned back then, at which point I caught a glimpse of the microscopic events that were taking place beneath the music's surface, and that realization changed my life no less than the songs themselves, which spoke to me in a manner no other music had up to that point, no doubt because my shtick has always been melancholia that takes stock of the strangeness of existence and sublimates it into something approximating beauty. So you could say that it boils down to 'I was 12, it irrupted into my life at just the right time, and it suits my temperament', plus the fact that unlike some of the music I was deeply in love with at the tail end of the 90s, OK Computer continues to move me whenever I revisit it.

Nice post, thank you for elaborating. We're about the same age and that video def caught my attention as well, I remember seeing that for the first time and thinking "WOAH, who the fuck is this??" even though I'd been listening to the Bends a lot the previous summer, and then when the band name flashed onscreen at the end thinking "of course!" and also "damn."
I was very conscious of it as a reaction to classic rock, or part of that continuum at a time when I was, yeah, just getting into "electronica". Until a year or two before that I was really disinterested in anything current or contemporary.

melancholia that takes stock of the strangeness of existence and sublimates it into something approximating beauty

Ha! Perfect.

(I've changed the way I spell WOAH to piss off Karl Malone)

It def was innovative (check! heh) on a textural level and others, not denying that.

Before 'Paranoid Android' I think my only encounters with Radiohead had been 'Creep', 'Just' and 'High and Dry' on the radio, all of which I liked a great deal. None of them sounded like the future, however, and when Kid A came out, I didn't miss the prominent guitars – I'd already gotten into Aphex Twin, Massive Attack and Amon Tobin by that point, also thanks to Musique Plus – so much as I felt like it wasn't quite as strong a batch of songs as the twelve of OK Computer. I still loved it, of course, but Amnesiac made a greater impression somehow.

the first two albums where I genuinely realized (at, like, 12 or 13) that album sequencing is important and that sometimes an entire album is amazing and can lay out a whole little universe, were Bat Out of Hell and OK Computer, in that order

Heh, I’ve never heard a Meatloaf album in its entirety but I was raised on a steady diet of Pink Floyd so I think that was my intro to sequencing. I recall independently making the connection with OK Computer, although Thom & co. seemed very keen to deny it back then.

(I've changed the way I spell WOAH to piss off Karl Malone)

― Adoration of the Mogwai (Deflatormouse)

but the joke is on you - some of my best old friends always used WOAH and continue to WOAH, so in a way your post and the decisions that you've made are making me nostalgic for a simpler time

I'd had 'Creep' on the Now 26 comp when my music taste was still very indiscriminate, I think it was sandwiched between Eurodisco hits which was perfect.

At the time Kid A came out, I was listening to 'Clicks & Cuts' and getting into "uptown music" (Babbitt disciples like Charles Dodge and Mario Davidovsky), I fully expected it to be a moody, alternative-electronic album with no guitars but felt I couldn't shell out for it unless it was "better" than OKC. So i just heard bits of it at friends' houses and didn't get my own copy until it had been out a few years. Boy, was that a mistake.

<3 KM

i was 14 when i heard ok computer, and it definitely blew my mind. i had very few musical favorites before that, but i believe my listening diet was mostly:

- classical (cheap beethoven and mozart CDs, not For Dummies! but on that level) - especially beethoven's Eroica, over and over.
- the offspring, smash
- green day, dookie
- rush, 2112
- queen, a night at the opera
- pink floyd, dark side

i bought ok computer because they were on the cover of an issue of spin that i bought at wal-mart, thinking "i can look for some new music groups to check out here". yes, i really thought like that. pre-internet, weird.
ok computer blew my mind. i listened to it one million times. every single song blew my mind and was perfect and could not be skipped. if i absolutely only had time for one radiohead song at the time, i would maybe skip to lucky. or let down. or karma police. or exit music. if you're going to listen to paranoid android, you might as well just start it off with airbag so you can get that cool lead-in. you could skip to SHA, i could see that.

immediately afterward i listened to smashing pumpkins, placebo, ben folds five, dave matthews band, and dream theater.

if i experience an erection lasting more than 4 hours, i may contact my personal healthcare provider

it was around then that i met banaka

OKC a good gateway into dave

in that same year, i grew from 5'0 to 5'9", and grew this one INCREDIBLY LONG PUBE, it was like the ur-pube

god, i love radiohead

Fitter happier
More productive
Comfortable
Not drinking too much
Regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week)
one INCREDIBLY LONG PUBE
At ease

It’s not how OKC sounds which made it a classic album, it’s how it feels and how well its themes resonated at the time.

And yeah, stuff like “climbing up the walls” and even “fitter happier” sounded like nothing else I had ever heard in my life.

You’d have to be a HUGE music nerd if OKC sounded like something else you heard before if you were in your early teens in the pre-internet age.

I am actually a bit enraged at the suggestion that an album can’t change your life if it’s “nothing new”.

but the joke is on you - some of my best old friends always used WOAH and continue to WOAH, so in a way your post and the decisions that you've made are making me nostalgic for a simpler time

― Zach_TBD (Karl Malone),

I have caught myself using WOAH outside ilx a couple of times recently so it seems the joke is indeed on me. I just never knew there was another way, you've opened my eyes Karl Malone.

Time alone will tell if you've changed my life. Could be, could be.

Anyway I don't think I said it was nothing new? I said it conformed to expectations of what makes music "good", or what makes a "good album", and did so expertly, maybe better than any other record I've heard to date. That's not really the same thing but I already acknowledged that post hit a bum note, you know?

getting into "uptown music" (Babbitt disciples like Charles Dodge and Mario Davidovsky)

Funny you should mention these guys – when I found out about the 'Idioteque' / Paul Lansky connection, I looked up Mild und leise and was woefully disappointed. At the time I was firmly in the 'early electronic music suxxx!' camp – much like Afx when he said Stockhausen should 'stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to' (which is somewhat ironic since I was too shy to dance in my teens). So yeah, you were definitely ahead of the curve there.

It was propinquity, or serendipity, or both. I grew up in a neighborhood adjacent to Columbia University and had neighbors who worked with those guys. They knew I liked weird music- one of them gave me a CD of 'Philomel' for Christmas when I was 15!

I was nerdy in the pre-internet age only in the sense that I listened to middling 60's and 70's bands like Paul Revere and the Raiders at age 9 or 10 instead of Green Day and Nirvana. Kind of parochial. Def not too cool :)