Radiohead - The King of Limbs

The Gloaming is the true crap HTTT song. Is it fair to say that's a really backloaded album? I've got little time for anything up until There There comes in, and then I pretty much love everything after and including that point.

The Bends is a fantastic record. I never listen to it today. It gets written-off as meat'n'potatoes acoustic rock but it's miles from that, especially given the context of when it came out. Planet Telex alone is testament to that.

m8 the opening stretch of httt is second only to ok computer's, it is wonderful

not even sure it's second given that ok computer has exit music where httt has backdrifts (challop sure but w/e)

planet telex is the best thing on the bends imo by a long, long way

I listened to The Bends in full the other day, and a number of songs do sound quite meat n potatoes to me. A couple of pleasant surprises on it which I'd forgotten about though, namely Nice Dream and Bulletproof.

not even sure it's second given that ok computer has exit music where httt has backdrifts (challop sure but w/e)

― And the cry rang out all o'er the town / Good Heavens! Tay is down (imago)

Backdrifts is incredible, one of their most overlooked tracks.

yeah zackly

not even sure it's second given that ok computer has exit music where httt has backdrifts (challop sure but w/e)

― And the cry rang out all o'er the town / Good Heavens! Tay is down (imago), Friday, 6 May 2016 10:14 (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Case in point. Backdrifts is awful.

Yeah Backdrifts is one of those awkwardly grafted electronic songs that still appear on Yorke solo records (also Where I End And You Begin and The Gloaming are so much better). The whole album could stand to lose four or five songs (especially in the second half) but we've done this to death over the years and I think it's now pretty underrated.

I listened to The Bends in full the other day, and a number of songs do sound quite meat n potatoes to me. A couple of pleasant surprises on it which I'd forgotten about though, namely Nice Dream and Bulletproof.

― the joke should be over once the kid is eaten. (chap), Friday, 6 May 2016 10:16 (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah those are some of the best songs. Iron Lung is all time too. Don't get me wrong, compared to what came later it sounds like Travis, but there's enough other stuff going on to make it well, not Travis.

"scatterbrain" -> "wolf at the door" is prob my favorite section of music on any radiohead record. album is still wayyyy too long and unfocused

The Gloaming is the true crap HTTT song.

Agree that the first half of HTTT is a major bummer. Go To Sleep has to be one of my least favourite post-Bends RH songs.

I love We Suck Young Blood and I think things pick up from there but on the whole I don't think it measures up to either Kid A/Amnesiac or In Rainbows.

the first 4 tracks are, like, so good

Don't get me wrong, compared to what came later it sounds like Travis, but there's enough other stuff going on to make it well, not Travis.

Oh I definitely enjoyed hearing The Bends and Fake Plastic Trees, they're cleverly put together songs, but if that kind of thing was the extent of their ambitions they wouldn't be a band I would particularly call myself a fan of.

the album version of the gloaming is unfinished, live with the extra bass & drums it's much better

i never used to like punch up at a wedding, but it's grown on me more recently, the groove's got a nice quiet menace to it. i wouldn't mind a 9 minute version of it really. i'd be interested in them doing some longer tracks, it's one direction they've hinted at but never really explored.

the weak point on the bends is bones, but it's a pretty good album if sometimes overrated. black star especially is fantastic

The Confield-ish textures on the Gloaming really do it for me, there's a bit that sounds like the beat has been chopped up into tiny pieces and is just sloshing around that I didn't really hear again until the Holly Herndon album last year.

xp Bones is crap. I'm not a fan of the title track either.

Another new video on Instagram, Thom appears to have lost his car this time.

Where'd he park the car? Where'd he park the car?

Another video this afternoon?

This'll be the PTA directed one I'd wager.

album out may 8th

Source?

https://youtu.be/TTAU7lLDZYU

and another song

seems like this album is going to focus on Jonny's orchestrations

New thread: 2016 Radiohead Album

6.25 long, LJ will be happy.

Is Radiohead one of the few marquee acts these days where people can name more than one member?

This thread has me listening to HTTT again. Still thing the first half (save the opening salvo) is a snooze. I still really like Punch-Up, it's a highlight for me. MAkes me think of Grateful Dead when they went disco for some reason. Great piano and I love the bass riff. No idea why people don't like it.

HTTT needs Go To Sleep and Backdrifts out, the rest is great.

Backdrifts is by far my favorite song on HttT, apart from the opening pair.

Relistening to HTTT right now and wow if there was ever an album that took me back to hating Bush and Iraq War as a teenager.... that and Rock against Bush vol. 2.

The Bends is perfect and a deserved classic. Don't confuse the far superior material on this with the masses of shit post-Britpop it inspired.

'A Punchup At The Wedding' is indeed a woeful heap of shit.

imo they never bettered OKC and I doubt they ever will, that album deserves all the accolades that have been heaped on it over the years

New song is 6 minutes btw! Be happy fans of long songs.

many xposts HTTT is by far my favorite Radiohead album. Maybe it's sentimental (first Radiohead album I bought, and it's how i learned the word pretentious. went with my dad to get it the day it came out. on the cab ride home, i noticed how all the songs had alternate titles and said i thought that was cool. my dad goes "Oh, that is so pretentious."), but I love how sprawling and diverse it is. fuck a focused record. I mean yeah, Kid A is great, super concise, but it's limited. HTTT is the only album where they get to explore every spoke of the wheel that is Radiohead. Speaks to the record's double album vibe that no one can agree which songs are shit/which songs should be cut... but like with the white album, most people will say "yeah, that one should've been shorter..." no way

*even though HTTT isn't a double album (at least not a double CD...i think all their records are 2xLPs...)

otm

No, not OTM. Kid A (and Amnesiac) covers a hell of a lot of ground, but the influences are blended together to form a satisfying whole, and is impeccably produced to boot. Hail To The Thief, by comparison, is a fucking mess - although there's some good songs on it. Some of the stuff on there was leftover material from the Kid A/Amnesiac/Amnesiac B-side sessions.

And as much as I love the evil keyboard sound on it, 'Cuttooth' > 'Myxomatosis' any day of the week.

oh yeah as much as in rainbows is my favorite radiohead record their best material imo is the amnesiac b-sides

Nonsense! Although if you take some of the b-sides and use them instead some of the actual songs on Amnesiac the record is much better! Here's a tracklist choice for Amnesiac + B-sides best of:

1. Packt Like Sardines in a Crushed Tin Box
2. Pyramid Song
3. You and Whose Army
4. I Might Be Wrong
5. Fog
6. Cutooth
7. Worrywort
8. The Amazing Sounds of Orgy
9. Kinetic
10. Life in a Glasshouse

Takes a three star album up to four stars.

There's a case about adding a studio version of the live piano version of Like Spinning Plates.

'Dollars and Cents' was a huge grower for me. The first time I heard it, I thought it was a bit of an aimless jam, but I've come to appreciate it more and more over the years... the echoing percussion and the overall moody vibe of it. 'Knives Out' is a favourite of mine too, and I've always been curious as to what the zillion different ways they supposedly attempted it sounded like. It was notoriously the one song during the entire sessions that they spend ages on trying to find an approach.

Oh yeah, 'Like Spinning Plates' piano version > the studio version.

But the piano version wouldn't exist without the studio version, and the studio version wouldn't exist without... 'I Will', which to me is the inferior song!

If you play the studio version of 'Like Spinning Plates' backwards, you get one of the ways they originally attempted 'I Will', the "dodgy Kraftwerk" version as Thom called it.

*spent

Yes I know that! But they released the process of getting there when they should've released the final piano version. The backwards one and I Will would have been better saved for rarities or b-sides as a cool fact of how the piano version came to be.

OTM. Couldn't possibly disagree with that!

Amnesiac was my favorite for a long time, but the electronics sound way more confident and well-integrated on HttT, and I just love the sound of the record as a whole. It's not as concise but there's just so much good material.

I don't know if I agree with that. The electronic elements on Hail To The Thief sound diluted to me.

Gloaming is good tho