In a 2009 issue of The Believer Magazine, two years after the release of In Rainbows, Thom Yorke disowned the entire album format on behalf of Radiohead, saying that another massive undertaking would "kill us."
Apparently the band has come to terms with their issues surrounding the traditional album. A Moon Shaped Pool, which dropped this weekend without ending the lives of any Radiohead members, is a beautiful contradiction, an album at once beholden to the past yet beguiled by the promises of the future.
This is the first Radiohead album that can't really be called epochal. It's framed by a pair of songs that have teased fans, like urban legends, for two decades. The album opens with the relentless Sawzall strings of "Burn the Witch," a bellicose, four-minute panic attack that the band has been honing since 1999, and closes with the devastatingly serene "True Love Waits," a song written during The Bends sessions in the mid '90s, and which appeared on the 2001 live album I Might Be Wrong in a very different form. As a fast-paced opener that's generally not representative of the rest of the album, "Burn the Witch" has a similar role on A Moon Shaped Pool as "Immigrant Song" had on Led Zeppelin's third album. And while "True Love Waits" is certainly worth the 21-year wait, it's permeated by a funereal feeling, as if it's mourning its former incarnations. The pretty, acoustic guitar has been replaced by sorrow-steeped pianos and the barely there traces of bass notes running in place in the background. Listen to the I Might Be Wrong version, on which Yorke goes after the high notes with more aggressive assurance; he now sounds like the weight of two decades has begun to crush him. Yorke circa 2016, singing a song penned by Yorke circa 1995, sounds sapiential, sorry. It's one of his most emotional vocal performances. "Just don't leave / Don't leave."
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Yorke's reveries about heartbreak and horrors nestle snuggly in Jonny Greenwood's textured orchestrations. "Dreamers / They never learn," Yorke sings on the second track, "Daydreaming." Later, on the bossa nova-influenced psych-stomp of "Ful Stop," Yorke sings, in an anxious staccato, "You've really messed up now," and "This is a foul tasting medicine." The album drifts through 50 minutes of cryptic lullabies, culling musical cues and motifs from the band's eclectic oeuvre as tape-reversed murmurs and faint echoes swell and dissipate amid Yorke's morose tidings.
There's an airy coherence to A Moon Shaped Pool, as if the entire band is exhaling at once, and we're hearing their breaths coalesce. There aren't many guitar riffs or drum beats that stand out because everything melds together flawlessly, each note measured and carefully collated, even by Radiohead's standards. On first listen, that coherence almost sounds like complacency, with most of the songs lingering in slow-tempo states of pensiveness. There are no Gucci little piggies, no fear mongering or "There, There"-style percussive freakouts. In this sense, it's like the offspring of In Rainbows and The King of Limbs, but more ambitious than either. A Moon Shaped Pool mingles acoustic/analogue instruments with electronic ones more thoroughly than any previous Radiohead album.
The common complaint about King of Limbs was the songs didn't "go anywhere." No such claims can be made here. Everything grows, goes somewhere, evolves gradually. It takes 100 seconds before a true lead instrument enters "Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief" (super British title), but more and more layers of ethereal strings and synths come in, as if we're hearing a song go through its entire life, from the advent and embryonic phases to maturity, climax, death.
Jonny Greenwood, the Mozart of played-through lead guitar, no longer has a thick rock crunch, or anything to prove. He imbues "Present Tense" with a constant flurry of gentle notes. On mid-album standout "Identikit," he adds fuzz and brambly palm mutes, pleating precise but never stiff layers before carving out a note-bending solo to close out the song while Colin Greenwood's bass jumps around, jittery. The chorus, and post-chorus refrain, is catchy in the most uncomfortable way. And Phil Selway, whose jazz-tinged motorik skin beating is essential to Kid A and Amnesiac (see: "Life in a Glass House"), has become masterful at programming understated drum machines. Listen to the wiry click-clack as Yorke croons "Broken hearts make it rain." Selway's sound has become lighter, subtler, though not necessarily simpler. It doesn't land with the same crash as it used to, instead slipping into the background spectrally.
Radiohead belongs to a rare cadre of artists who, in the vein of Brian Eno or the late Prince, consistently challenge how we listen to music, how we interact with it (also: Kanye with his work-in-progress The Life of Pablo). Since gifting audiences with a pay-what-you-want plan for In Rainbows in 2007 and dropping the barely-LP-length King of Limbs, with the bare minimum of notice, to befuddled fans who insisted that a second part loomed, Radiohead has made unpredictability their M.O. Even the anti-viral hype-building campaign for the album feels like effacement to modern notions of PR. They sent out tangible leaflets, by snail mail, to fans in the U.K., and then scrubbed their online presence into an apparition, leaving their social media accounts blank, like internet carrion, their site a white void. The music videos for "Burn the Witch" (The Wicker Man by way of Trumpton, directed by Chris Hopewell) and "Daydreaming" (a Paul Thomas Anderson-helmed abstraction that's playing on 35mm at select repertory movie theaters) seem to belong to another era entirely.
Like a veil of smoke writhing before you, A Moon Shaped Pool is hard to get a hold of, even as it lingers, slowly dispersing. "Just don't leave / Don't leave." And it's gone.
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