#2040 Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool

=== The Light Album =

Come and hear the end of the rock band called Radiohead, gawk at the rainbow they've been chasing for decades, the meeting of the beams cast by Kid A, Amnesiac, and In Rainbows, focused by The King of Limbs. Probably not their best album (definitely not if you came for the guitars), but it aches with opus.

--

By now it's clear: rock was a chrysalis stage for Radiohead, a tradition they've spent the last 33 years shedding. From forgettable crunch came decade-defining mutation, followed by molting, molting, molting: dead skin snares and vestigial guitars falling from every album, the sound falling further and further into pure production. And now the figure/ground's finally flipped.

If the platonic Rock Album is all about performance captured, if it's the cured essence of 3-5 folks playing guitar/guitar/bass/drums, set to tape, readymade for your listen at a press - - well, there's no trace of that tradition here.

That backbeat firmament is scarce: rhythms blipped out as violins, pulses, hisses as often as drums. Guitars are guest stars. A company of othersounds surge into your headspace in washes: strings glare and glower, choruses blossom like sunlight over mountains, pianos flicker doubled through windows, synthesized hybrids bloom like lens flares.

There's barely a glimpse of electronica / IDM, that convenient not-rock diversion for decades; this is something different. Less pointedly strange, more of its own accord.

The songs never seem to go where you expect, until you stop expecting. Each hooks into the next so fluidly that you end up disoriented. It's a listen in blur, memory and senses, shedding the idea of a band altogether. It swoons with alien orchestral exotica, James Bond slither, crystalline shimmer. Wildly spatial production puts drums in attics, vocals in backalleys, strings in the yard and closing in fast, hard pans, desperation balance.

=== Pool ==

The contradiction at the heart of this album is this: it draws deeply from the past to become bracingly original.

It pulls from the whole of Radiohead's 21st century catalog, is peppered with songs penned decades ago, reminds you at times of the great weird songs of the past: Kid A/In Limbo/Pyramid Song/Spinning Plates/Weird Fishes. But all that weirdness is standard here: what was once a flourish or a gimmick is now the whole and substance of the work - it's the leap between the room with the cubist painting and the entire cubist castle.

I'm a rock guy, and I'll always be wistful for Paranoid Android/National Anthem/2+2=5/Myxomatosis hammerdroppers. But I'm also a sucker for albumwide commitment to a sound. It's one thing to make an album sprinkled with oilslick strangeness, another to dive into a the depths. There's no hedge here, no midgame Optimistic/Knives Out/Dollars and Sense anchors, no errors of pacing, no misplaced song or rest, not one clumsy note to break the spell.

--

Radiohead's found newer, stranger creatures on this deep dive. At times it feels made of light, at others it slips beneath the surface. The strings onrushing, undersea beasts appearing out of darkness, jellyfish synths sparking bioluminescence, choruses shimmering, glimpses of a deep-distant moon through tides and schools, swirling around the negative space of expectations.

It's a counterpoint to The King of Limbs, that deeply underground album, with all of this light - and yet touched by the same inky darkness. It is easy to get trapped in those vertical sounds: dirges from the oubliette on Identikit, the sky falling on Tinker Tailor, the muttering from the back of your mind on The Numbers. It carries that weight of The End.

This is probably not Radiohead's best album, certainly not their most important. But it's their most perfect. It doesn't have the highs of OKC, the startling inventiveness of Kid A, but it feels created-fully-formed. It is completely consistent in itself in a way that lends transcendence.

Aside: I want new Radiohead albums as much as the next guy, but this would make a hell of an album to close out a career on, sinking into darkness, dissolving into light.

=== The Moon The Moon ===

Is it good?

It's gorgeous. Mysterious, haunting, unknowable, original. An instant cult classic. I called The King of Limbs a minor masterpiece - this sounds major.

The atmosphere, the emptiness, the lightness, the loss that comes from floating through a song with a ghost of a chorus; that ambushes you with operatic squalls, that trapdoors its guitar parts, that tethers you to strings and kicks the anchor. It's an album that gloams with energy and color from the front and the back and left and right and above and below, all repetition in the details but blooming and dying unexpectedly, with only a passing interest in being listened to, songs unfolding as if they'd only turn out this way this one time, as if every listen might come to rest somewhere different, as if this experience was a unique one, laid out just this one time just for you.

It's an album that feels more familiar and more unique the more you revisit it, a reoccurring dream that reveals the strangeness of its logic, little by little, morning after morning after morning.

4.5/5