Radiohead: A Moon Shaped POLL

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.

Thom is the worst part of Identikit but without him it sounds to me like a less interesting song from Studio (remember them?)

https://youtu.be/po8e8nftgqI

it might be one of the songs I usually skip... surprised to see it at 1

Is this the third time Thom has used a chorus of repeating rain-related ad nauseum?

1. Paranoid Android (rain down come on me)
2. Sit Down Stand Up (the raindrops (x100))
3. Identikit (broken hearts make it rain)

Seems he really enjoys repeating the word rain.

I'd happily hear a Radiohead cover of 'Have You Ever Seen The Rain?'

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

― Lennon, Elvis, Hendrix etc (dog latin)

or at least their best since "some girls"

I'd happily hear a Radiohead cover of 'Have You Ever Seen The Rain?'

― Lennon, Elvis, Hendrix etc (dog latin)

rain related songs i would listen to radiohead cover:

can't stand the rain
raining blood
buckets of rain/nuggets of rain
she brings the rain
lady rain
cold rain & snow

rain related songs i would not listen to radiohead cover:

sound of the rain
the rain song
purple rain
it's gonna rain
it's a rainy day sunshine girl

I could see them covering She Brings the Rain as they're huge Can fans and have covered them before.

They're also very much into Neil Young so:

See the sky about to rain
Be the rain

Be the rain has a global warming message in there so it seems specially fitting.

Other Neil young songs involving rain (huh? There's more than I thought seems that NY influence on Thom is they share a rain-obsessesion):

Early Morning Rain
Raining in my heart

Also you guys forgot "Box of Rain" by grateful dead that's a popular one.

"Rain Dogs" could be good.

rain

Although hard to think of two singers more different than Thom Yorke and Tom Waits.

The rain dogs the rain dogs the rain dogs the rain dogs

Yeah they're very different... I'd be more interested in Waits covering Radiohead. Life in a Glasshouse and Pyramid Songs would fit him nice.

Rain Dogs FTW

they would do a good "Rain" (Beatles) i feel

only 2 votes for "Ful Stop" is madness

yeah, definitely my fave. woulda voted for it

Live clips I've seen of "Identikit" can feel like they have a little more energy than the studio version but I still like it a lot.

'Ful Stop' seems to have become my favourite track on the album now, with 'Identikit' being nudged down into second place.

"Decks Dark", for that little Talk Talk choral lift.

weekly broadcast of archival gigs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaJKOUQS1T4

In case folks didn't hear it, Radiohead eventually put "Ill Wind" (from the deluxe AMSP version) onto YouTube etc.:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C7tfLhHaeU

The version of the album I essentially consider "the" version now lops off "Burn The Witch" (which doesn't fit the sound/vibe/flow of the rest of the album), and slots in "Ill Wind" in alphabetical order between "Identikit" and "The Numbers" and it works perfectly. A much more coherent and cohesive album--the Radiohead I put on most often, having listened for 26 years at this point.

me too

I dont know this album super well, nor am I a Radiohead stan so feel free to disregard my thoughts, but I'd say it's one of their least interesting. Lovely warm production, though they've been doing that a while now, great little touches, but doesnt show you anything they haven't done already, and better. Feels like a treading water effort.

ugh, wrong

Very, very wrong.

i talked about it a lot in some other thread but this is totally the best radiohead album imo

Nah, but it's top 5.

THE best? Not just the best for deep 'head heads? Better than in rainbows, okc and the bends? Ok.

Brad routinely claims the best album in a celebrated band's discography is among those you'd expect the least – it's an endearing quirk of theirs.

idk between the songs being very good if almost the loosest and most impressionistic set they'd ever written and the sustained haunted woods feeling which gets deeper and deeper as a result of the sequencing... yeah, it's the one for me. in rainbows used to be my fave. ok computer is a good record

It’s very concise and it’s well loved not just by “deep” radiohead fans. E.g.: In rateyourmusic where every radiohead album has over 40,000 the consensus is:

OKC > KID A > IR > AMSP > THE BENDS

I don’t really have a use for OKC anymore. At this point I’d say KID A, AMSP and TKOL are the Radiohead albums I personally feel like coming back to the most.

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