A Moon Shaped Pool is Radiohead drowning our expectations, again
Much like David Lynch does with his films, Radiohead use expectations as a tool, only to belie them completely. They have done this throughout their history. Just when you think you have figured out the band's musical direction they go somewhere else entirely. No two albums are alike.
Famously, they split their own fans into two camps with the release of Kid A in 2000, a sharp turn from their previous album OK Computer, which received universal critical and popular acclaim and is still considered one of the best albums of the '90s, if not of all time.
OK Computer was a brilliant album by any standard and Radiohead could have been forgiven for spending the next several years cashing in on their newfound art rock street cred. What they did instead was to take the underlying theme of OK Computer - is our obsession with technology driving us towards an increasingly impersonal, mechanical, alienated and emotionless world - and turn it on its head. In Kid A, technology wasn't treated with suspicion, it was woven inextricably into the fabric of the music - but the music was of a dystopian world.
When journalist Alex Ross asked them how they felt about bands like Travis, Coldplay, and Muse finding success by copying Radiohead's sound from the '90s, Thom Yorke quipped, "Good luck with 'Kid A'!"
This game of playing with expectations was on full display earlier this month just before they released their ninth studio album, A Moon Shaped Pool. While you would expect a band that is about to release a new album to flood all of social media with announcements, teasers, promotional artwork and sound bites, Radiohead erased their internet presence almost entirely, deleting all their tweets and Facebook posts and rendering their website blank.
In a world where not having a Facebook account makes you an instant outsider, deliberate erasure of your online self is a much bigger statement than anything you could shout out on the internet.
When the video for the first single from the album was released, I must admit it defied even my expectations. Over the last decade, Radiohead's, and specifically Thom Yorke's, music has tended towards having a sparse, minimalist, glitchy, electronic sound that could be described as cold but atmospheric, dense, layered and deep. It's a kind of music I love, but it's also a kind that can fail to (for lack of a better phrase) hit the right notes for popular acceptance.
Radiohead's previous album, 2011's The King of Limbs, was met with a lukewarm response because it seemed too distant to really connect with many listeners. I liked it, but it wouldn't feature among my favourite Radiohead albums. Given Yorke's most recent solo musical output, I expected (and hoped) that the band's new single would be something similar to The Mother Lode.
So when I heard "Burn the Witch" for the first time, I was a little disappointed. Because this wasn't the Radiohead I knew, pushing their own boundaries to the cutting edge of popular music. This seemed like a step back to safer territories. It sounded like stadium rock. Like a Coldplay track. Had the tables turned? Had Radiohead now started taking cues from bands that once copied them?
I mean, sure, the tune is catchy and the orchestral arrangement is fantastic with frenetic pizzica to strings over a driving, powerful rhythm. Sure, it sounds upbeat and joyful and… wait, what did he say?
"Stay in the shadows/Cheer at the gallows/This is a round up/This is a low flying panic attack"?
What's happening in the video? Did they just show a children's stop-motion version of The Wicker Man?
Underneath the thrillingly pretty string arrangement lay something sinister. Behind the cheerful veneer was a sense of growing dread. Virpi Kittu, the animator who worked on the video, said it was a take on Islamophobia and the refugee crisis in Europe. Well, what do you know? This was the Radiohead I knew.
"Burn the Witch" is the album opener and it stands apart from the rest of the songs, which are quieter, softer, far more introspective. The video of the second track of the album, "Daydreaming", was directed by one of my favourite filmmakers, Paul Thomas Anderson, whose last three films have been scored by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood. The delicate pianos and strings that can be heard on this song and throughout the album are Greenwood's dazzling cinematic soundscapes at work.
With "Daydreaming", the tone of the album shifts from the boldly political to the deeply personal.
When Yorke sings "Dreamers, they never learn/Beyond the point of no return/And it's too late/The damage is done", you can't help but think he is talking about himself. But, for Radiohead, the personal has always also meant the political.
Yorke is known to make jokes like "Radiohead operate like the UN and I am America," and is a friend and staunch supporter of journalist, political writer and climate change activist Naomi Klein (whose book No Logo was acknowledged in "Hail to the Thief").
So it isn't surprising that later in the song, he sings, "This goes/Beyond me/Beyond you" and "We are just happy to serve".
The song that begins with soft tones ends with the sound of snoring that becomes increasingly jarring until it sounds like a chainsaw. The sleep of reason produces monsters?
This personal/political duality is also evident in the smooth, bossa-nova-style song "Present Tense" in which Yorke sings of distance being "like a weapon of self defence". "I am doing no harm," he says. "As my world comes crashing down, I'm dancing, freaking out, deaf, dumb and blind." Is he talking about himself, or our collective apathy towards atrocities committed by humans on other humans and the planet?
But perhaps the most overtly political song in the album is The Numbers, a beautiful folk-tinged protest song on climate change that Thom Yorke had performed at Pathway to Paris.
In it, he sings: "We call upon the people/People have this power" and "We'll take back what is ours", words that are uncharacteristically straightforward for Radiohead, whose songs are usually brimming with cryptic lines that often sound absurd. The ominous, enigmatic "Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief", for example, also seems to be about man's strained relationship with nature, but is far less direct about it.
Like most Radiohead albums, feelings of melancholy, disillusionment, emptiness and alienation run through this one.
"Identikit" is about constructing an image of a person in your mind only to realise that it is hollow and false. "Ful Stop" is a manic Krautrock-inspired tune about coming to terms with the truth, in which Yorke accuses himself of messing up everything. In "Decks Dark", Yorke sings of "a spacecraft blocking out the sky" harking back to "Subterranean Homesick Alien" from OK Computer, but while in Subterranean the aliens hovered benignly over the earth making Thom wish they would swoop down and take him on board, in Decks Dark they cause a panic.
The panic is on a more personal level in "Glass Eye" in which Yorke is the one who feels like an outsider among people with "concrete grey" faces. The song features piano tones that sound like they are being played underwater perhaps to reflect Yorke's own sinking feeling. He dreams of leaving, getting away from it all. The happiest, most positive song in the album, "Desert Island Disk", is about awakening, seeing the light and escaping.
If you ever felt Radiohead's music is too cold and distant, listen to this song. Suffused with warm sounds, it feels like the words are being whispered directly into your ears.
Many fans have speculated that Thom Yorke's split with his partner of 23 years has had a major effect on the album. It sounds likely. Lines like "Take me back", "Have you had enough of me", "Different types of love are possible", "I feel this love turn cold" and "Broken hearts make it rain" appear in almost every song and are repeated incessantly. Last year, Björk released her album Vulnicura, which was largely about her break up with artist Matthew Barney and her coming to terms with it.
It seems through this album Yorke is trying to do the same - examine it from different angles and process it. But by the time we come to the last song of the album, Yorke's ego has fallen away to reveal the nucleus around which this whole album seems to revolve: a broken heart.
"True Love Waits" has been twenty years in the making. Its lyrics often seemed to me to walk a thin line between earnestness and parody (a line that Radiohead have walked with the expertise of Philippe Petit). They never did straightforward love songs - it just wasn't their thing. Even the songs that could come closest to being described as love songs had to make larger points about human nature and society.
"True Love Waits" came from nowhere and sounded strange enough to be a joke, a subversion of the typical love song with its grandiose declarations of amorous intent. But here, in the new version, it is stripped off its armour and its quivering, fragile core is laid bare. When Yorke croons "I'll drown my beliefs/To have your babies/I'll dress like your niece/And wash your swollen feet" with an almost childlike hope, you feel the fretful fear and anxiety of a man who is watching helplessly as his love dies.
When he sings "And true love waits in haunted attics/and true love lives on lollipops and crisps", you can hear a lover driven delirious with pain.
When he pleads "Just don't leave/Don't leave", it breaks your heart. It makes you want to go back to the beginning and start all over again. And this is the genius of the endgame. It keeps making you come back. Radiohead wins every time.
Against the norms of popular music today, the songs in A Moon Shaped Pool have no hooks. They are just beautifully written and composed tracks that demand your full attention. Listen to it in solitude from beginning to end and listen to it multiple times. It will reward you for it.
While it is unlike any other Radiohead album, it has one thing in common with the others. It asks you to throw your expectations out the window.
Expectations have a habit of starting off as hope but turning into certainties, and certainties eventually lead to rules. There are no certainties. There are no rules. Ultimately, there is only music, and what we make of it.