Radiohead: A Moon Shaped POLL

Daydreamer or Decks Dark for me, with Tinker Tailor as the slow burning dark horse.

Present Tense has been my favourite for a few weeks now.

Really hard, but I'm sure it's Daydreaming. I was listening to it the other day and thinking that structurally it's almost as diverse and rooms-within-rooms-ish as Paranoid Android

Burn the Witch is such a deceptive opener/first single. I like the album but that song feels really out of place - the rest of AMSP is pretty sad and wistful. Burn the Witch just has this really tense and sinister vibe that none of the other songs have. I would've preferred a whole record like that.

Best Song on Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool

maybe we can have an interim check in poll around september while we are waiting for the results of this one

Yeah but that one was done like the day after the record was released and closed six hours later. I think it was 'parody'.

Oh bloody hell, I didn't mean for it to end in December.

I don't think this will ever be something other than "Identikit".

The one with the snoring strings.

Voted The Numbers, but by December I'll probably have worked through all of them. The part where the strings come in emphatically.

I didn't realise that those snoring sounds were mostly made up of cellos that had been deliberately tuned down so they went out of tune

Present Tense

I don't think this will ever be something other than "Identikit".

― Hi! I'm twice-coloured! (Sund4r), Tuesday, July 5, 2016 2:00 PM (three months ago)

think this is my fav too, on first listen

"Daydreaming," "Ful Stop," "Glass Eyes," "Identikit," "Present Tense" and "True Love Waits" are all top shelf Radiohead. But I think if I had to pick one at this point, it'd be "Identikit".

"Ill Wind" would be up there with "Kinetic," "Worrywort," "A Reminder," "Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong," "Talk Show Host" and "Bishop's Robes" for all-time Radiohead b-sides. "Burn the Witch" remains the odd-song-out, even though I really like it--it just doesn't fit the sound-world of the rest of the album. So I treat it as an amazing non-album single, with two lovely b-sides.

It's funny, because while I'd probably have to concede 'OK Computer' as their "best" album by some sort of objective standard, at this point 'A Moon Shaped Pool' is probably my personal favorite, or certainly what I want to hear most. In a way it's their most confident work, not showing off their (admittedly impressive) chops like 'OK Computer,' not trying too hard to be a not-rock-band/groove-based-band (which inevitably they are/aren't, respectively), marrying their natural talents and what they'd like to be coherently, seemingly at ease with being simply themselves. Totally washes away the plodding, boring "rock" of 'Hail to the Thief' and the middling float-away electronic wisps of Yorke's last solo album. It's kind of what the best from the two discs of 'In Rainbows' almost were, and making it again even better. Never saw them reaching their full potential a quarter-century in, but I think they really have.

(Personal history--was a super-fan 1994-2001, culminating in being six feet from Yorke at the taping of their 'Later with Jools Holland' performance just before 'Amnesiac' was released, but collapsing under the disappointment of 'Hail to the Thief,' generally preferring Yorke's first solo album and the 'Atoms for Peace' album to contemporaneous Radiohead in subsequent years. So, not really ripe to love new work by them.)

(Oh, forgot performing "True Love Waits" at a talent show in 1997)

'Identikit'

Haven't listened to this for months. Radiohead's "carpet slippers" album.

Listening now, "Decks Dark" is also tops. So basically every track except "The Numbers" and "Tinker Tailor" would make my top 20 Radiohead songs all time, and those two are excellent, too (especially the Vannier strings on "The Numbers").

"Present Tense" is probably the most emotionally affecting Radiohead song. "Or all this love will've been in vain..." really gets me.

I'm beginning to think that maybe 'Ful Stop' is actually the secret highlight of this record.

Been listening today again with fresh ears trying to decide what is my favorite song in here and at this point it feels to me like Spectre might actually be the one I love the most.

There are some tricks which I love and others which I hate. I love Burn the Witch's percussive sound from using col legno on the strings that starts as a conventional arrangement and suddenly turns into horrid chaos. When the cello enters at the end of Daydreaming (is it a cello? it also sounds like a trumpet)... anyhoo I can go track by track but let's just say I think all the piano/strings arrangements are off the hook.

What I hate is actually Thom's voice in the record... not his voice per se but the insistence in making it a background instrument.... particularly in Daydreaming and Present Tense where his vocal loops / echoes are a distraction that I predict will date horribly when listening to this album in 10 years. Present Tense is a beautiful song but having those annoying 'SELF-DEE-SELF-DEE-SELF-DEE' 'THE-PRESS-THE-PRESS-EN-TEN' 'KEE-KEE-P' vocals in the verses are not cool at all and they kind of ruin the song for me, they're not even in the background, they are fucking loud in the mix. He's been recurring to those vocal loops for his solo shows but someone has to stop him! They might work live to make harmonies but in the studio you can do much better than that.

Ah yes... my favorite song at the moment is The Numbers... it's nothing special... you could even say it's a little bit by the numbers but I like the sort of 70's jam sound, the whole song is mostly 3 chords played throughout but once again those piano/strings arrangements make the song.

The problem I have with the album being so reliant on arrangements is that the songs feel very dependent on them. I try to imagine Thom playing all of these songs solo without all the arrangements and excluding Present Tense, Daydreaming and True Love Waits all of these would be fairly boring songs without those strings.

I really don't like Identikit until it kicks in with the 'Broken hearts/Make it rain' part.

without all the arrangements and excluding Present Tense, Daydreaming and True Love Waits all of these would be fairly boring songs without those strings.

Two of my favourites, Decks Dark and Ful Stop, don't even have strings.

yeah but Moka's not wrong - it's the production I listen out for on this record (although there's nothing wrong with that). I wouldn't mind hearing what these would sound like stripped-down.

true love waits. how often do you get used to a live version and then the studio version comes along and *improves* on it. not that often i say.

xxpost Hail to the Thief is great

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

i have no recollection what i voted for so hopefully no one else voted and i can find out

or everyone will truthfully acknowledge their vote, such as i am for 'faust arp'

Best Alternative Album and Best Rock Song (!) for "Burn the Witch" at the Grammy noms today

i listened to this once but i don't remember it at all. is it better or worse than king of limbs?

the last thing i really enjoyed from this band was in rainbows

If you listen to any Radiohead album just once I doubt anything will be memorable. Their songs from the 00s onwards take a couple of listens. I think I've hated everything since Kid A on first listen (well, In Rainbows was very accesible in that regard iirc) but after a couple of listens I've been on board. I still cant warm to Hail to the Thief but everything else is at least a 7/10.

xp it's a billion times better than king of limbs Marcos. it's probably their best album since OKC or Kid A. takes a few listens. very chilled and monochromatic but never dull or boring

this is a really really good album imo

ok thanks all i will revisit it

I like the Grammy-nominated rock song Burn the Witch, but it doesn't fit into the flow of the album at all. It could have only been sequenced first because it would be even more jarring between any of the others.

i was a big radiohead fan and enjoyed this upon first listen but kind of forgot about it rather quickly

Decks Dark

i'm still listening to this album frequently

Never been a huge Radiohead fan, but thought this was their strongest since Kid A, and was disappointed that the buzz about it dissipated after a few weeks. Only weak track for me was Desert Island Disk.

Isn't this true of all albums/media these days? A few weeks is a long time. No one is talking about the Bowie album anymore, but that doesn't mean that no one is still listening.

Find this album a bore tbh. First three tracks and Tinker Tailor would make a sweet EP tho

Jordan otm.
I still dig this out fairly frequently but make a point of trying not to over-listen to it.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

interesting. I thought Daydreaming would walk this. the first bit of Identikit frustrates me - sounds thin, awkward and unfinished like much of King of Limbs. I don't like how Thom puts the emphasis on "THAT we all can love / THAT we all can love"

that bit sounds like he's trying to crowbar lines into a melody that would have suited better lyrics

only 2 votes for "Ful Stop" is madness

Would not have expected Identikit to win, it's not even in my top five. The 'broken hearts' choral explosion is pretty astonishing, but as others say the intro and outro are relatively weak.

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 :)

I was into Luc Ferrari around the time of Kid A but didn't know about any of the associated musique concrete stuff at all which is... baffling.

Were there samples or references to other EA compositions than mild und leise?

They sample arthur krieger's 'short piece' from the same 'elctronic music winners' album. That title!!!

*kreiger

Oh wow, they were winning pieces in the first ISCM competition!

Ha!!! I didn't know.

What's the etiquette around sampling two consecutive tracks off the same record in a song? I was under the impression that sort of thing was frowned upon at the time.

i think one is ok, two is definitely frowned upon, but if you do it three or more times it becomes something that is categorically different and maybe even better

relate to people upthread who say OKC felt like a pivotal life moment. it's not like i hadn't heard amazing, ambitious music by that point. i was already a fan of the bends. but OKC came out at exactly the right point: literally the day i finished my GCSEs, just as Britpop's shiny naivete was starting to fade. it felt right

xp You just keep sampling more of it like you're jamming and it'll look like you meant to do it