I've never been explicit about this, but my model for this blog is to open each mini-review with a line about how I heard about an album or why I'm listening to it. I figured since this album needed no such introduction, I might as well spend the space explaining that little pattern.
First, an aside. As I finished listening to this album, suddenly several things clicked and I realized it was entirely possible that this is just part 1. The "newspaper" concept, the band's professed desire for a communal listening experience, the short album length relative to the two planned vinyl disc, the title and sentiments of the last song, etc. Further investigation reveals this is a common theory on the web, but no one knows for sure. Which is fun. Trying to evaluate a Radiohead album is a ponderous weight to start with, listening to their most narrative album without knowing if you've heard the ending is even tougher still. But lets firmly assume that this all there is, as I did through 95% of my first listen, and see where that takes us.
The first five songs are the sound of a band being eaten by a computer.
There is the feeling of movement through a space that is at once digital and organic and encompassing. The first line commands the mouth to open, and down we all go. Each of these first five songs is built on a single relentless, markedly artificial drum sample, around which parts surge in and out, most of them also relentlessly, powerfully digital. There are distorted, clipped, loops and buzzes that build and blossom and wither suddenly, and there are huge bass synth surges beyond instrument (most notably at the end of Morning Mr. Magpie and Feral). The latter sound like passing organs, pushing like tumors, affecting you on a subconscious level that is oppressive and intense. I've found electronic music lately that evokes movement through space (especially this), and this album does the same thing, in a different way. The movement is constricted, dense, slow and menacing.
The strongest human presence is the bass, and sometimes the guitar. These are the only sounds that evoke the band, instead of the environment. Morning Mr. Magpie is once again the best example, featuring subtly gorgeous bass runs that weave followable lines through the nanomachine internals.
Thom is here, but he is part of the body, part of the space. He is not part of the band, and he is not with us. The vocals rarely provide a focal point, but rather are an outside menace, the wolf at the door. Most of the songs feature multiple vocal lines: not doublings of the same line, but separate vocal parts, all ethereal and falsetto, on different paths, moving in difference stereo spaces, wolves circling. This comes to a head in the first part's climax Lotus Flower, where vocals pull around in every cranny, knives in the woodworld. These first five songs are inside-out. The beats and vocals, traditionally the backbone of the rock song, are a scattered flock of angry crows, they swoop in and attack and recede in the dark, with only the occasional bass/guitar line providing a cohesive path.
Then, we move to the second part, made up of Codex and Give up the Ghost. Suddenly we have piano. We have a simple clipped micro-bass thump heartbeat where swirls were before. It is the last vestige of the machine. There is a sense of being outside. Of having left the space of the first five songs, as Thom sings about dragonflies and water, as reverb bounces off the sky, pink and green borealic. The heartbeat continues as a memory of the space the album once occupied, as if the threat was still in the distance. The transition from those first five songs to this one is just striking. There is a sense of relief, but of lingering concern, especially as deep, dissonant strings take the place of the reoccurring digital bass surges of the past. I was left with the sense of a grisly horror movie victim, who has fled the shack, but who is still in the woods, and the killer hasn't been killed.
Give up the Ghost continues the theme of escape into uncertainty. Here, there is a beat not unlike the previous one, but now it is bigger, more real, no longer digital in the least, while nuanced acoustic guitar appears for the first time all album, and the reverb opens up like daybreak. We hear actual birds. And yet, we're still in the woods, the bird repeat like the loops in the machine, and we are just as likely to be dying as being reborn. The vocals swirl triple-plus, lurking in spaces all around, singing indeterminate phrases that ask that you "don't" do something, maybe a request not to hurt, not to haunt, not to hunt. It's a tense feeling. Still not out of the woods. The final skitter, skipping electronic noise is as menacing as the sound of a branch breaking behind you.
Then there's closer Separator, which seems like something of a third part unto itself. Here is the closest thing we have to a normal beat, but even it seems something of a simulacrum, hi-hats ending too fast, beats too clipped, its existence too relentless. Thom's voice still circles, doubled. "I'm a fish now, out of water." we're told, even as guitars chime in, and the pace quickens, hinting at cheer, there's still a sense of foreboding. "If you think this is over, then you're wrong" is a repeated line, and it spells the lack of resolution out in no uncertain terms; we could be breaking out of the woods to or we could be seeing the light as our pursuer finishes the job. There is a sense of relief, but what follows is an open sky. Thom asks "wake me up", as something ends, as the guitars harken to whiteness and light. On one hand, something has ended. On the other hand, as the last notes chime out, the ending is uncertain.
Assuming again that this is the whole of the album, its a deliciously unsatisfying ending. In my very, very first impression email to Robin I compared the album to a David Lynch (who I tend to like) movie, afterward it is over, but it has just begun. The movie was just the seed in your mind, and its up to you to decide what to do with it. When I finished Mullholland Drive, I literally put my head in my hands and spent 15 minutes puzzling it out until it resolved, as a work, in my mind. I have the same impulse here.
Again, it is Radiohead's most narrative album, and their most mysterious; the lyrics are more oblique than ever, the songs less solidly-formed. To clarify, I don't think its actually about escaping from a computer/killer/killer computer in the woods, but it changes over time; there is everything before Codex starts, and everything after, and there is Separator, and they make the most sense in order. Like a David Lynch movie, there are suggestions of connected parts, but the parts don't fit in any simple way. Themes reoccur and trigger half-conscious memories of their predecessors. It is troubling in ways you don't understand, and it's not particularly pleasant. Those who like Radiohead for the rock, or even for the beauty, or who otherwise liked In Rainbows, may well not like this album. It is not a fun album, it is "serious stuff", with all the chin-scratching satisfaction / stuffiness / pro / con that implies.
Is it good? Yes.
Is it great? I'm not sure yet.
It is interesting, compelling even. It is a bizarre creation, cohesive in structure, that demands to be listened to as an album. There is no point in pulling out any of these songs on their own, except for maybe the oft-mentioned Morning Mr. Magpie, which has an absolutely killer bassline in its skittery beat skeleton, and Lotus Flower for its wheeling, swooping vocal lines. Pacingwise, it really reads as five parts in claustrophobia, two parts in escape, and a final, curious denouement that is blindingly aggressive in its unwillingness to resolve.
I'm also struck by its remarkable ability to evoke light. The first five songs are so dark, so closed, so at-best-glow-in-the-dark, and the last three are increasingly so bright that I almost think I see light when I listen to them. And yes, there are synesthesia bonus points in my book.
It's entirely possible that this album has an unfair advantage, as I gave this my complete attention, where other albums got a while-I-program first chance and were set aside forever. But the listen was certainly compelling, and thought-provoking afterwards, which is rare these days. Even now, it skitters around in my brain, unresolved. I don't even know if I liked it all that much, but I'm intrigued by it. And not in a Magnolia "glad I don't have to see it again" kind of way, in more of a Synecdoche NY "what the hell was that and what did it mean" kind of way that draws me back.
I've considered this album firmly from the perspective of rock music. As rock, it comes across as minimal, experimental and weird, slightly krautrock, very opposed to rock and roll traditions of all kinds. It is slow-paced, formless, and largely light on melody and hooks. All of those things are double edged swords. As electronic music, I'm not sure where it lays, maybe this is all terribly passe by the standards of this dubstep thing everyone can't shut up about. As music in general it is either interesting or boring, seemingly the sound of Radiohead seeing how far away from rock convention they can get and still have people like them, pushing as hard as they have since Kid A, and arguably pushing even harder. Which, again, is on the razor's edge of being a good or bad thing. If the whole album followed the model of the first five songs, it would be one thing, but the way that those set up the arc of the last three sure makes it a lot harder to dismiss.
I think that, in the end, so far I like this better as art, as a whole media object, than I do as songs. But that matters plenty. And even as I listen to it while writing this (unbelievably lengthy) (so-called) mini-review I find it growing on me, as the parts that were oppressive find homes in my crannies and other elements move to the fore. Maybe I'm talking myself into it, or I'm just a huge Radiohead fanboy, or I have aural death-cabin Stockholm, or I've been subconsciously tricked into hoping for a second half that's never coming, but for now my instinct lies at (the low end of) 4.5/5
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