RAdiohead

Here we go again.

I like Radiohead -- Amnesiac was my favorite release of last year, and Kid A was high up on my 2000 list -- but I'm not really the kind of person who hunts down mp3s of unreleased tracks. I'd rather wait for the record and hear the songs in their finished versions. (Yeah, I know... "Aren't you special?")

To listen to a new song live, to experience it, to watch it unfold, to hear it change as it is reworked is a magical, wonderful thing. It's one of the joys of following unsigned bands is that they lack the fear and/or resources so they are more likely to do it in public.

But to record a live song, distribute it and critique it before the artist has had the chance to stand back from the painting and go "There, OK, that's done" seems kind of unfair. Both to the artist, who is being interrupted, and to the song, which may or may not take a completely different shape eventually.

Listening to works in progress is wonderful, but trying to pin them down and dissect them seems, well ... I'm not going to say disrespectful, but it does seem kind of ... pointless? Self defeating? What's the word I'm looking for?

That said, no I've not seen Radiohead on this tour, nor heard any of the tunes.

I would hope so I really do.

you couldn't resist it could you melissa.

''Scatterbrain: Sounds like the physical act of crying. A dischordant ballad with no way out. The aftermath of a storm.''

this is such a cliched description I don't even know where to begin. Get your head checked melissa.

''Up On The Ladder: Starts poorly, Radiohead try the whole "rocking out" thing again. Fail. But the ending is beautiful, desperate, his voice over mournful synth chords. A song about immense disappointment.''

Pushing the 'sad chords' triggers again. Mournful, desperation, dissapointment. sob, sob, sob...all the way to the bank we go.

''Where I End and You Begin: The day the earth stood still. The Ondes-Martenot keens its unearthly cry. The song is a sentinel, a prison.''

''Wolf at the Door: Each word is a knife. An impossibly hurt, fearful song.''

er...more crying then. I'm beginning to think Thom Yorke wasn't breast fed when he was a baby.

''A Punch Up At A Wedding: The most seethingly angry song I've ever heard. On the surface, it's all insistent beat, slightly rollicking piano, and bass. But it's coming apart at the seams. It's ready to rip your throat out.''

yes but angry at what. Is it like an adolescent who is just angry for no reason or is it actually anger at something specific. This is all bullshit.

''Go to Sleep: Eastern-inflected roots rock song. Dull, really.''

b-but why is it dull? don't just leave it at that.

and on it fucking goes...I avoided the golden jubilee but there's too many institutions and you can't avoid it all.

There, There - bit of a homage to Adam and the Ants circa Kings of the Wild Frontier featuring Ed and Jonny on JAMC Bobby Gillespie style stand up drums with a top acending climax - a fitting opener

Scatterbrain - needs a lot of work and doesn't really go anywhere.

Up on the ladder - pretty rocky with thom doing his 'you and whose army' unfocused anti blair schtick

We suck young blood - slow and swinging with harmonies from phil and ed (phil was wearing an amusing madonna style headset during his backing vox)

I will - an old song, briefly featured in the 'Meeting people is easy' doc with lovely harmonies from Thom and Ed

Myxamotosis - fairly fast rocky number with Ed playing a les paul (surely a first).

going for some lunch now, will post my thoughts on the rest later

melissa, thank you putting up your descriptions.

Melissa couldn't resisit it and nor could I.

''(This is why I don't post on ILM.)''

ILM isn't a radiohead list. Or a keiji haino list. Or improv or free jazz, etc. fans and non-fans of everything to do with [x] are here and when a thread is opened by soemone and I feel the need to comment I will do so.

I'm not 'pissing', I'm just adding my thoughts on your descriptions. Sorry about the 'checking your head' line though.

when you describe a song as ''The most seethingly angry song I've ever heard'' then I want to know at what as well.

irony = julio's stance as radiohead hata being JUST as cliched and as ho hum as he wants (hopes?) the new songs to be. he HASN'T EVEN HEARD THEM and yet he took time out to bash the fecking DESCRIPTIONS. and why?

its one thing to be convinced that radiohead are inauthentic or overrated; its another entirely to pounce like a wolf on anybody else who sees something in them, especially when the crux of that fan-music connection is one borne out of vulnerability.

he (or anyone else) can take the sadness, confusion, anger, fear and deride it, mock it, HATE it all he wants. me, i'll take it (as well as the songs) and celebrate it all. not because i'm a sad moany bastard (really, i'm not) but because the alternative, to deny all of that, is too ugly and dark and boring to bear.

Jules: "Get your head checked melissa" constitutes personal attack with intent. But what's this claptrap about banning the guy??? Tell me that's a fucking joke. I thought what he said was valid ranting.

And right-on Mark P - you are on the money.

yeah. I've heard everything they've done up to this and when I saw the descriptions it just reminded of the past. Irony indeed.

''its one thing to be convinced that radiohead are inauthentic or overrated; its another entirely to pounce like a wolf on anybody else who sees something in them, especially when the crux of that fan-music connection is one borne out of vulnerability.''

i did not intend to 'pounce'. I didn't know it was borne out of some 'vulnerability'.

''he (or anyone else) can take the sadness, confusion, anger, fear and deride it, mock it, HATE it all he wants.''

I love or hate a lot of music with nothing in between, which is unfortunate sometimes.

melissa- hope you accept my apologies.

''"Get your head checked melissa" constitutes personal attack with intent.''

yeah, and I apologised for that.

I like it when it goes

snp
snp
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I am a really serious and respected critic, and you are all flops!

xp but if phil was part of the smile they'd either have to program in quite a bit of it or just change it to match him

again, a lot of this was covered when ed, colin, and phil were all sacked on the same day, i think sometime in 2020

i also think skinner is a big improvement on the programmed beats on thom's solo work. i'm just spitballing here but to me, the percussion on the smile sounds like the improved human version of those old beats, maybe more like what thom was thinking. it's a real pain in the ass to program skittering percussion. a very reasonable path is to go minimal. when you start making it sound "human", like on most of thom's solo stuff, you either have to do that for the entire song, which is laborious and also sometimes feels like it defeats the purpose, or let it be minimal and throw in occasional human-like elements like unexpected fills or "mistakes" or effects.

all of that is great, and lord knows i've spent way too much of my life programming in beats and trying to make them sound good. but it ALSO really cool and probably a huge load-off to just have a really good drummer play with you

I like it when the hi-hat goes CHchCHchCHchCHchCHsiupCHchCHchCHchCHchCH

like, skinner could be playing everything he's playing and eating a sandwich at the same time, and then could hear thom in the background daring him to "sound like a rubber ball for 3 seconds" and he just would, without missing a beat, and then go right back to the prior beat and the sandwich. he's fluent in drums

phil is great but there's a reason he plays the same exact fills in all the same exactly places in live performances over the past 25 years

(mainly i just want to turn this into defend phil selway day, lol)

the last time we had this conversation i think we all agreed that it was good phil took drum lessons around/after okc

and that the slurred 4/4 on "pyramid song" is cool and good

these are some of the consensus phil conversation beats, for sure

the phil meta

then there was the whole King of Limbs period where they got another Phil, and they had to deal with all of the confusion with that

(i'm assuming they found another second drummer, or a third drummer, after that, but it was also a bald white guy and they had to make one of those awful "listen, i don't mean to be unfair to this third guy but we can't have three phils in a row" conversations)

Phil should be canonized for 'Morning Bell' alone.

phil is great but there's a reason he plays the same exact fills in all the same exactly places in live performances over the past 25 years

― Bruce Stingbean (Karl Malone), Tuesday, 17 May 2022 19:45 (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

...because they own and are part of the song as written? Radiohead's songs are incredibly tightly-constructed, it is their strength a d their curse, they've never done a studio song over 7 minutes long for example

I always loved his groove on subterranean homesick alien, too. the ghost notes alternating between the snare drum and the bass drum, like tides

xp

iirc "subterranean homesick alien" was the first thing that came to mind when i rushed to phil's defense before he was inexorably sacked

looked forward to the new album by the sacked members of radiohead "we don't need no stinkin hi-hats"

First there was Thom. Then there was Tom. And before anyone realizes what was happening, they were covering “Lorelei” and Jonny had been sacked

I kind of want to play the old Radiohead conversation hits and subtly change up my parts, introduce some new things

where is the ride cymbal in all this

there wasn't really anything on this album that made me think 'phil couldn't have done this' idk, didn't feel like a huge stylistic shift

'the smoke'?

half of this album is pretty good (though not up with rh's best) and the other half loses me

still feels like it suffers a little from having less moving parts than radiohead, the orchestration helps fill in those gaps but sometimes it feels like things aren't quite as fleshed out still

i also wasn't serious about this being their prog album or anything lol sorry for starting the "what is prog" debate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upWL_oB53vQ

they're doing "feeling pulled apart by horses" live

okay i'm going into this with a megapint of haterade and even i can't front on "thin thing."

whoo that is some psychotic hypnotic post-kraut ephemera. megajam.

listening again.

like if you told me this was a kid a outtake, i would believe it completely. easy highlight.

second half of the album is way better, but it still feels like maybe a solid 3 mic side project to me. makes sense that they're playing thom's solo material live - that's what it reminds me of most. not bad, though it's not hitting me like anima did at first. that one's lustre wore off with repeat listens for me, so maybe i'll revisit and compare with this again. it's alright though - pretty good, i guess. sorry again for my outburst re:jg upthread. he might be a jerk, but whatever fine, he's in the band whether or not it bugs me so i might as well listen.

thin thing is fuckin incredible

This album is great!

they're not playing any other thom solo stuff live (would have thought "cymbal rush" would be a reasonable chance though) & "feeling pulled apart by horses" is one of thom's solo tracks that started off as a radiohead song & jonny has a writing credit on it & played on the studio version

I'd put Atoms for Peace and this ahead of King of Limbs, easily.

i wouldn't, at all.

they're not playing any other thom solo stuff live (would have thought "cymbal rush" would be a reasonable chance though) & "feeling pulled apart by horses" is one of thom's solo tracks that started off as a radiohead song & jonny has a writing credit on it & played on the studio version

― ufo, Tuesday, May 17, 2022 7:36 PM

yeah, i always liked thom's recording of that song, but i hardly ever put it on. something about his "thom" material just doesn't keep my attention for very long.

That song “feeling pulled apart by horses” is the original Reckoner and the one where the IR “Reckoner” came from.

The intro to “feeling pulled apart by horses” is the section where Reckoner came from. You can sort of hear it on the outro to the latter, however who knows what those initial demos of the song sounded like, I guess they used to be in the same key before being different songs.

I think Jonny also has a writing credit on The Eraser’s title track.

Would be amazing to see them try that one on this new setting but I don’t think they’ll do it.

HTTT is probably the most similar one to OKC, but where OKC is oddly digestible and fun to listen to all the way through, HTTT makes for an exhausting listen and is way too morose in comparison.
moka always otm wrt radiohead

Thin Thing is very good, a highlight for sure, but when it comes to 'psychotic hypnotic post-kraut ephemera megajams' it has maybe a tenth of the intensity of, say, Oranssi Pazuzu. and maybe that's okay - not everyone is required to like metal vocals ;)

I think Jonny also has a writing credit on The Eraser’s title track.

iirc it was just thom sampled the piano chords from jonny noodling around on the piano

"the opposite" and "thin thing" are both onto something but end up a little, well, thin. "a hairdryer" just sounds like a king of limbs outtake (though with less percussion)

(except more tippytapping)

A friend asked me about the time signatures on this record (or rather asked if someone on reddit was right), so I took a listen:

The Same: 4/4
The Opposite: 4/4
YWNWITA: 5/4
Pana-Vision: 7/8
The Smoke: 4/4
Speech Bubbles: 4/4
Thin Thing: 6/8 or 12/8, but I consider those pretty much synonymous with 4/4 and with each other, it's just a matter of how you prefer to think about it.
Open The Floodgates: 4/4
Free In The Knowledge: 4/4
A Hairdryer: 4/4
Waving A White Flag: 11/4, or a phrase consisting of a bar of 6/4 + a bar of 5/4. But that's all the same thing really.
WDKWTB: 4/4
Skrting On The Surface: 11/8

hard record to tippytap my foot to, sheesh

And when you add them all together, you get a sum time signature of 68/64

Making the average time signature for this album a cool 17/16

lol

Struck hard by “Open the Floodgates” this morning

Best song in here

Fantano gave his review already and it’s not so surprising that I don’t agree with 90% of his takes. The songs he doesn’t highlight are my favorite ones in here.

He has plenty of wrong Radiohead related takes.

Also OTF has the distinction of stealing its first couplet from Roxette