Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool

"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

a better analogy is like...pablo honey, a long playing record of a rock quintet and the songs arent that great for your ears...the bends, another long playing record of a rock quintet and the songs are better...kid a, not so much rock...tkol, not so much songs...

Tkol, economy in the shitter, back to school for a phd

Burn The Witch/Spectre 7'' available in UK indie record shops today.

Not that they seem to have told the shops at all!

I caught myself skipping 'Burn The Witch' when I put this on last night. Uh-oh....

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).

― Sufjan Grafton

Yes. Present Tense and Numbers were the two highlights on my first listen but I could see Decks Dark and TLW eventually becoming favorites. Weakest one for me is Tinker Tailor...

In other things: I've been listening to Spectre all over again in the context of this album and I think it's amazing. The vocal melody he makes when singing "My hunger burns a bullet hole a spectre of my mortal soul / The only truth that I can see
Is when you put your lips to these" keeps getting stuck in my head (just realized I kept mishearing the first line as 'My hungry bird" which made no sense). Even the lesser guitar and piano covers I've heard on youtube make you realize how great of a melody it is. Only thing ruining this song from being the best thing they've released in years is the awkward drumming and the reverb overload on the voice (I also blame those as the factor that ultimately won the bond theme to Sam Smith which is a shame... I'd love to have seen people that don't follow them remembering them from a song other than Creep)

Oops string of thoughts and I accidentally hit space in the wrong part.

Agree that Tinker Tailor is a slightly weak point. It's not awful though.

I mean listen to this cover:

https://youtu.be/ZgszBXPNZQA

Not even doing it in the Silverchair voice with an accent ruins that melody.

Agree that Tinker Tailor is a slightly weak point. It's not awful though.

― TARANTINO! (dog latin)

Not at all. It's too early to tell but this feels like the most cohesive album in their career for me. There's always one or two tracks which I keep skipping in every one of their records - even in the 'honeymoon' phase - and this time around I only skip Burn the Witch because I heard it way too obsessively before the album came out.

Burn the Witch is okay but it has a different texture from the rest of the album and feels more like something that would have come out around the In Rainbows era.

It is too early to tell, but right now it could easily contend as top 3, if not their best. Every other album has issues, even OK Computer which I've held up as a masterpiece since I was 16 sounds lyrically sophomoric in today's context (Subterranean Homesick Alien?). Everything that came after had high-points but never quite glued together in a satisfying way and like you, I'd find myself skipping a lot. I don't see myself skipping much on this. It works as a piece and it's the kind of complete artistic work bands like Radiohead should have been striving towards all along.

I still think In Rainbows is probably better, it's tighter and less prone to self-indulgence.

Two little things I love:

-In 'Ful Stop', that 5/4 guitar part that comes in during the last third and cycles over the 6/4 beat

-The synth during the build/bridge in 'Identikit'. It's the kind of sound that's all over TY's last solo album and 'Amok' but nowhere else on the album, unexpected & perfect.

a mole shaped poon

God this is so good. "Glass Eyes" is so dope.

^my review

really like 'Desert Island Disk' but the distortion/sibilance on the 's' of 'standing on the edge of' at 2:40 kinda drives me crazy

I'm giving this yet another listen - at this stage, I'm unsure where I would rank it in terms of Radiohead's discography, but the more I hear it, the more I'm beginning to feel that this will ultimately become one of their more satisfying albums for me.

A cerebral, theoretically informed but affectionate review on academic website The Conversation, of all places -
https://theconversation.com/a-moon-shaped-pool-and-the-unmistakable-alchemy-of-radiohead-59160

So yeah, on my umpteenth listen now and this is one of their best ever albums for me, and one of my favourite albums of the year so far. I wasn't expecting this to be anywhere near this good, so it's a welcome record for me.

-The synth during the build/bridge in 'Identikit'. It's the kind of sound that's all over TY's last solo album and 'Amok' but nowhere else on the album, unexpected & perfect.

― sam jax sax jam (Jordan)

love that bit.. it works great with the odd vocals. it's too brief. the preceding guitar chord/strum is nice, too. some nice filtering going on with the drum/reverb sounds

digging the album, save for Present Tense and Glass Eyes. Thom Yorke's voice does get tiring after a while. and Desert Island Disk feels overly Beck-ified, slight

Yeah, the synth in 'Identikit' is a great moment, although I love that entire section of the song completely. One of those moments which caught my ear on the first listen.

Ful Stop is a real beaut, and Decks Dark. Tinker Tailor sets up a great atmosphere and it's got a nice riff, but it seems to evaporate somehow, 2/3 into its progression.

'Tinker Tailor...' is the weakest track on the record for me, but I still like it plenty.

Played it a few times now, the title suits it.

I'm a bit confused about this album so far. As mentioned upthread it's kinda hard to remember the melodies of the songs, but imo it also feels like melody isn't really what "occupies" or is central or w/e to Radiohead these days (also true for TKOL which i like lot). I mean, AMSP "sounds" great but it also sounds like a Johnny Greenwood album. He shows up everywhere and "interrupts" whatever the rest of the guys are doing. Happily surprised about Identikit and esp True Love Waits which I thought would be awful.

Do you guys think this album will appeal to people who weren't previously Radiohead fans? My friend came back to me saying he was left with a bit of an 'is that it?' feeling.

I'd say so. It depends on what they are fans of, obviously.

I dunno, I find 'Burn The Witch', 'Identikit' and 'Decks Dark' quite catchy, actually!

I have a friend who doesn't rate Radiohead at ALL (he mostly listens to ambient/contemporary classical/celestial jazz stuff) and this is their only album I would want to play for him, I think he may even actually LIKE "Daydreaming" and "The Numbers"

comparisons:
- 'desert island disk' sounds like neu! (the ambient bits) and faust (the off meter acoustic bit)
- jonny likes dubby kind of production stuff still, its cool
- speaking of steve reich kinda moments, in the right channel on 'the present tense" there are some looped vocal bits that sound v similar (for v short bursts) to his tape loops pieces like 'come out' or 'it's gonna rain'
- 'ful stop' almost works a fleetwood mac song
- the piano on 'true love waits' reminds me of the way a lot of ambient piano bros like eluvium do their piano