Radiohead – “A Moon Shaped Pool”
Pictured: Radiohead performing at the Comcast Center in Mansfield, MA on May 29, 2012.
Amid the deafening buzz of Internet reaction to Sunday afternoon’s digital drop of Radiohead’s ninth studio LP, it feels worthwhile to take a step back on the U.K. quintet’s career arc, just for a moment.
Few artists of the past 30 years have gathered the mass of critical writing that surrounds Radiohead by the year 2016, and even fewer have had it all skew so positively. An apt comparative peer for the band is elusive, because they have no genuine equals. The current lineup of Thom Yorke, Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien and Phil Selway is the same one that formed as On A Friday in 1985, released a middling debut album with a killer lead single in 1993, and then spent the next two decades successfully dismantling rock and piecing it back together on their own terms. The string of critical adoration, broad influence, commercial success and enduring fandom the band has maintained since 1995 sophomore effort The Bends is a legendary run; not from a solo auteur with a rotating stable of collaborators, but from the same five British dudes who brought you “Creep” and still regret it.
Where other artfully-minded rock bands of a similarly enduring stature have stumbled or regressed by their third decade together, Radiohead have held an uncanny course of reinvention and refinement. U2’s last Apple-foisted release made for better comedic fodder than listening, and while R.E.M.’s career ended on a moderately redemptive note by 2011, they still had an Around the Sun to make up for.
The closest Radiohead have come to a misstep since their debut is surely 2011’s The King of Limbs, but it’s a project that suffers more for coming across as a deliberately minor statement than for being a bad record. The debut of the cohesive and engrossing A Moon Shaped Pool in fact colors that release for the transitional pivot that it really was. Limbs‘ 8-song, 37-minute structure, which juxtaposed an A-side of IDM-inflected rhythmic workouts with a mellower and more traditional second half, scans as a double-EP that captured the band at a crossroads. It was a release that prompted a twinge of critical backlash for the first time in a long time; a suggestion that the band had perhaps fallen off at last.
Pool refutes that notion with full force. It’s a goddamn heartbreaker, and an entry in the Radiohead canon that only deepens and complicates the labyrinthine puzzle that is this band. Some of these tracks have debuted in full or in part on past tours, some are brand new, one dates back to the mid-90s – and yet, there’s not a trace of disjointedness here. Old songs assume new arrangements and implications, and lush orchestration harmoniously coexists with eerily affecting minimalism.
It is the band’s stateliest and most somber album, even for a career steeped in melancholy, and thus its quietest moments are its most telling. “Daydreaming” employs little more than simple piano figures and creeping strings over its nearly seven minutes, and finds Yorke lamenting that “dreamers…never learn.” The imagery of Paul Thomas Anderson’s haunting video is inevitably evoked, and the song’s aching loneliness is palpable. The sonic palette recurs, even more pared down, on breathtaking closer “True Love Waits.” The fan-favorite ballad, typically performed on solo acoustic guitar by Yorke and only previously available via live album I Might Be Wrong, gets a graceful studio makeover that leaves the 20-plus-year-old lyrics unchanged. “Just don’t leave,” Yorke still pleads.
Radiohead are hardly the band to write what one would traditionally call a “breakup record,” but Yorke’s recent separation from his longtime partner Rachel Owen certainly seem to weigh heavy on the mood.
That lead single “Burn the Witch,” all urgent strings and “low-flying panic attacks,” is one of the record’s more upbeat cuts points to its disinterest in anything resembling the traditional rocker. “Identikit” makes a rousing refrain of the notion that “broken hearts make it rain,” and krautrock slow-burner “Ful Stop” exhibits the band’s gift for rhythmic propulsion, but the guitars here are largely acoustic and textural rather than brashly electrified. Lead riffer Jonny Greenwood instead focuses his efforts on the sweeping string arrangements that permeate the record more so than any previous Radiohead release. Nine albums in, the band still finds ways to convincingly reinvent.
Further layers and insights and reconsiderations will surely reveal themselves in time, as one lives and breathes with the record and escapes the snap-judgement trap of post-release week, but for now, A Moon Shaped Pool surely reaffirms Radiohead as one of our most consistently compelling working bands. As I so eloquently stated in a text last night, it’s “like, ‘remind you why you love music, compel you to write about it’ good.”