Crack Rock makes me laugh. I try to listen to it seriously but I just can't stop smiling and giggling.
Exactly, dude the first time listening to this when he gets mellow for a second and then outta nowhere the big CRACK ROCK CRACK ROCK right in the middle, I was bustin a gut at that. "How ya feelin girl? How's the gutter doing?"
And the drums on that track are seriously boss.
Which reminds me I had the best Endtroducing vinyl session today, Stem/Long Stem was a standout, Mutual Slump is great, Midnight in a Perfect World hits with such a swampy drum track it can't help but be the greatest song on the album. I've been thinking about this lineage of standout sample-heavy albums from Endtroducing > Since I Left You > Donuts > Cosmogramma, my buddy thinks Deadringer is just as good as Endtroducing, that one had little staying power for me. Does anyone still listen to Deadringer?
Pyramids, Bad Religion, Pink Matter, and Crack Rock for me right now. I've been working out Bad Religion guitar/piano trying to master that little vocal switch from EM to Em in the chorus, dude has songwriting chops but you can totally hear where he had to do a lil copy/pasting to piece together the vocal performance :p
I'm glad everyone's into Flylo by now, my Cosmogramma tee is neva goin outta style
Great quote, I've always adored the aspect of rap that just fully embraces how epic and dramatic a string/horn section can be, even the chord progressions and structural ideas of rap over the last two decades have roots in 16th-20th century classical as much as they do roots in blues, rock, soul, and jazz (which all themselves borrow from classical by degrees, never quite as emphatically as rap). Combine that with the producer's mindset of going for cutting edge technology, this whole hippin and the hoppin and the bippin and the boppin will be around forever
It's about living well as the best revenge after a breakup you fools. This is Nas's most emotionally mature work yet (yes, I might even argue with Illmatic despite how mature the guy was as a teen) and the top-notch beats are only proof that he's still got an ear for it, probably a better ear now than he's had in the past. If there's one criticism I would make it's that the beats are actually *almost* too clean-cut, they sound as if Nas wanted to make a Kanye album as far as scope of musical backdrop. Actually I'm undecided if this is a criticism or not because he takes Kanye's 'bowl you over with class' aesthetic and actually applies more finesse and intelligence to it, but up to the point where it tries to be so majestic it becomes nearly campy and self-parodic. I've only heard the album twice so I'll reserve judgment but I really like it so far.
The only strange outliers on that list are North and Oneirology (without A Piece of Strange no less) but I like both of those albums anyways. Good stretches in there, 58-53 is a real hot streak. We have cultured ourselves here rather broadly now haven't we?
I wouldn't wanna clique with anyone else, boo
here I am talkin to myself
Sorry to hear about your guys radio stations, much respect to the Nirvana breakage.
That look Tyrion gives Cersei after she reminds him about his mother, most seriously I've ever taken a little person in my life. I was afraid and in awe.
Ohnomite is becoming my favorite rap album of the year so far but there's a lot I need to get still. Clams Casino's second instrumentals is creamy and sweet.
What? The bass in Jigsaw is glorious! One of my favorites on IR
You know what I listened to IR on vinyl recently and it stood out more as the final reserve of energy before Videotape because the first half of the album floors me, I'm beginning to accept Faust Arp as a studio song with a string section AND its place on the album (as long as I never have to subject myself to the scotch mist video again), Reckoner heads up the second half in terms of quality, and then there's House of Cards, which is perfectly enjoyable but as the longest song at five and a half minutes on an album of songs otherwise succinct AND varied, it leaves a long stretch a little too thin and when the IR discbox came with the second disc and it has Down Is The New Up and Go Slowly and really I'm thinkin, why couldn't Go Slowly just have replaced House of Cards, that would have been a gorgeous close. And then there's a part of me that still thinks Go Slowly should replace Faust Arp and Down Is The New Up should replace House of Cards and maybe swap places with Jigsaw.
But House of Cards goes by and then there's that bass, it's way up front along with the drums on vinyl...and it totally saves the album's energy, reminds me Colin is my favorite member, and he...in a way preserves the Open Pick freeness of it, funking all over the scale and occasionally dropping directly behind Thom's vocal line as if he were mocking Thom right behind his back. He's certainly having a ball here, he even moves all over the chorus like a madman.
And THEN I see your post again and I'm like, god damn mother ****er was right the whole time.
Ed provides less prominent but equally valid melodic counterpoint, Colin and Phil hold down a simple but classy 3/4 (mere coincidence they placed it as the third track on the third album?), Colin merely present for the melodically meandering verses (literally the entire verse is eight variations on a G chord) but animated in the chorus, which to this day is one of the most honest major key to-the-point choruses they've penned as far as the music goes. The sensory overload from effects and intensely positive vibes they're putting out contrasts with the lyric "I'm uptight, uptight". There's that English irony...
This song is sort of a rarity in a live setting, but it is not forgotten. The performance from the Hammerstein Ballroom around the time OKC came out is the best one that's close to the studio version. At 3:23 in the 97' video I believe Thom says "I'm drunk", which, as we all know from the studio performance of Planet Telex makes for a loose booze-energized vocal delivery from Thom, that's just speculation on my part but his performance here certainly justifies it. I'm sure just as well that the acoustics of the legendary Hammerstein Ballroom are aptly suited to the song's exploratory atmosphere so as to highlight the vocal reverb. The first-time-ever acoustic version has appeal for for being such a natural base platform for a song, though I suspect Jonny has already had his hands on the intro/outro sections at this point. Thom's voice goes a little Pablo Honey on us so it's thankful this song made it to OKC, on which his voice his perfect for every song. By comparison, it's most recent rendition from Cincinnati doesn't have the greatest audio source for the video, but it's clear that the biggest improvement is Jonny's ever further expanded freedom in whale sounds. And as soon as a better audio source comes out, it'll be apparent that Thom's switch to Grand Piano is a tour-wise move, considering the extra percussive nature of the band's recent reworkings. There's good quality videos of it at the Roseland Bowl in '11 but Jonny doesn't reach quite so far into space :/
9/10
Pyramid Song (10) Airbag
Where I End And You Begin (9.5)
The National Anthem (9) Subterranean Homesick Alien In Limbo Go to Sleep
Karma Police (8) Everything In Its Right Place A Wolf At The Door
Separator (7.5) Electioneering Little By Little
Fake Plastic Trees (7) Jigsaw Falling Into Place Videotape
Studio Version - Hammerstein Ballroom '97 - Cincinnati '12 - Premier acoustic -
English irony is always so passive aggressive. If Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" is lamentation of societies traps and pitfalls, Radiohead's "Subterranean Homesick Alien" is a complete rejection of society as a trap altogether. A call for some otherworldly being to whisk you away from Mundanity, Suburbia and fulfill universal wonder. On that subject, because it is such a popular idea that RH lyrics are all intentionally vague, it is worth noting that Thom openly longs to know what the meaning of life is in SHA. This may seem like a spontaneous musing but that short-sells how base the question is to humans, after all what other type of questions carry enough weight to merit extraterrestrial saviour fantasy depictions in the first place? In a way, the quest for the meaning of life was the destination point of the song's journey all along.
The imagery leading up to it is compelling, given the vivid cosmic spectrum waltz floating along. The fender rhodes oscillates a near-elliptic orbit and the heaven laser guitar sounds exclaiming the upper register combine to lull the listener into imagination land, and that's not the only treat that Jonny deals out here. He periodically squishes the frequency shape, I believe he's feeding a '75 Telecaster through a Roland Space Echo but I don't know what other pedals he's got it with and I think the guy was already rewiring his own guitars with extra modulations by this era. There's something he does at 2:47 to serrate the decay of the note as the tone twists and pitch bends ever so slightly - Only Dave Gilmour and Jeff Beck come to mind as peers who have that level of tone control on a guitar. And that's just one of countless little hair-raising moments that guy touches on for this song. Real genius.
edit: and if anyone was interested, i wrote this to the beat of Checkmate Royce 5'9" and Concise's - RAW
Footnoting raps with like this (to the tune/beat of X) I think is the most sensible alternative to actually recording a verse in real time - an initiated cadre of judges can use these as references to clear up rhythmic ambiguities and we avoid the can of worms involved with having to judge people's beatmaking talents as well as their lingual acumen.
That said, I'd die to hear Giggs kill some ambient black metal beat with his scottish accent
This is another interesting one rhythmically, there's surely 5 beats to the measure but the emphasized guitar notes effectively split that beat in thirds, creating the same on/off syncopation effect that drives Myxomatosis through its treacherous slipstream. In Go To Sleep, the same 'slipstream' effect deploys only while the guitar is ascending up fifths in the All I Need bass fashion, giving every other measure the feeling of lift as the rhythmic ground seems to fall out from under the melodic ascent over and over again. This cyclical tension is made an upward spiral by the dynamic additions throughout - Phil drum's hit like a defibrillator, all guitars and the bass systematically continue to shift up octaves and pretty soon Ed's cooing a rising melody as Thom ramps up "I'm gonna go to sleep and let this wash all over me!". The transition to 4/4 here is seamless and a great release of tension. The song is now free to groove and 'swag', Colin comes to the forefront in that respect and reminds everyone that this is a jam band when he is in charge, until his brother decides to send his guitar through a max/msp patch he created (consider it the Autechre instrument) and glitch the song apart. Figures that he'd write a patch that seems to tremelo pick at different rates for him. It doesn't make it a genius solo, just an incredibly fun performance idea and silly/awesome sound. Don't take the band too seriously.
Because if you do then you'll eventually be reminded of all their embarrassing music videos, Go To Sleep being no exception to the cringe-worthiness of their video canon. Thom is rendered in PS1 graphics emoting on a park bench while some buildings crumble and rebuild, I guess. It doesn't mean anything, it's not appealing to look at. I'm prepared to forget about it again.
The live performances, thankfully, negate any bad vibes the video leaves. The light show of the 2012 tour makes every song special and they certainly nailed it here in Newark after not playing it for some 8 years or so - but the real gem is the Earls' Court performance. It was the grand finale of their '03 tour, in the heat of the HttT era frenzy and energy, many definitive performances come from this show, Go To Sleep being one of them. You can tell they have their hearts in it on this night, Thom's energy is legendary and the recording fidelity is golden. This is the rock band they were destined to become, no matter how much they tried to avoid it.
9/10
Pyramid Song (10) Airbag
Where I End And You Begin (9.5)
The National Anthem (9) In Limbo Go to Sleep
Karma Police (8) Everything In Its Right Place A Wolf At The Door
Separator (7.5) Electioneering Little By Little
Fake Plastic Trees (7) Jigsaw Falling Into Place Videotape
For as played out as the word 'swag' has become in the hands of white america it's worth noting that Go To Sleep is the song that broke Radiohead from their Kid Amnesiac anti-rock antics, in Ed O'briens words, the band had "learned to let the guitars swagger again". The band was obviously eager to go back to their roots in three-guitar alt-rock, here a decade wiser than Pablo Honey they achieve a sort of "wish I could be fifteen again with the knowledge I have now" fantasy about their own adolescent musical career. The lyrical content? A rumination about death, of course. Sure, there's a small measure of political/social paranoia in the loonies and monsters taking over, probably thrown in courtesy of Thom's magical sorting hat for wizard non sequiturs as per Hail to the Thief's 'collage of cultural baggage' motif. The line "this is how I get sucked in over my dead body" almost comes across as self-chastise over mortal obsession, the rest of the song a sinister or even cynical acquiescence to death.
The intended irony here is that the song sounds so lively compared to their previous two albums, of course it slots in as the fifth song on Hail to the Thief (one can't help but assume that's partly because it begins in 5/4) so at this point in the catalogue at least 2+2=5 has shown RH can rock again, but Go to Sleep is the next legitimate contender to have actually been the opening song, along with There There. It certainly kicks up a storm immediately following the more conceptually wind-driven Backdrifts, the song that drags the album's pace considerably by being overlong (Band members have also mentioned that HttT needed pruning in hindsight, without naming songs specifically. It is anyone's guess why they continue to entertain The Gloaming literally every single night on tour when Go To Sleep is relegated to 'rare fan-favorite' status. Where I End and You Begin doesn't even get played anymore).
Studio Version - From the Basement - Cambridge Acoustic -
This song is in a strange spot for me right now. Foresight tells me it's a slow grower with high reward, maybe it's that I actually watched the From the Basement performance just now for the first time in months and was more engaged than I'd ever been with the song. I never noticed the rhythm guitar at the end is syncopating the chord sequence - Thom's propensity to do that should have been a dead giveaway, of course I only realized by watching him - his guitar is so affected it aurally comes across as as if weren't even strummed it all. Jonny and Ed's contributions toward the end promote the final meandering, undulating soundmass that draws from the same fever-dream of Meeting In The Aisle, bringing a dazzling close to an album that is tragically short, leaving many listeners (initially myself included) with a sense of false closure that does Separator no favors. Of course, it kinda shoots itself in the foot with the "If you think this is over then you're wrong" line at the end of an eight song album. How could you blame people for thinking there was gonna be a part two? Though its not as if Thom were wrong - Supercollider and The Butcher were released as a post-album offshoot and the revelatory From the Basement sessions reveal The Daily Mail and Staircase to be essential to the vitality of the perception of the album as a whole, which still only leaves one to wonder why TkoL proper resolves so soundly and convincingly on Separator without even having one of the four actual conflicted/frustrated songs to resolve from (TAMTW, Butcher, Staircase, Daily Mail). The high point of conflict on the album they gave us is Feral, and despite that songs remarkable build of energy and frenzied drum programming, the conflict it presents gets unwound in Lotus Flower, frozen underwater in Codex, and dies peacefully in Give Up The Ghost. Separator in context feels like a contented encore after the album ended on song seven after having forgotten what it was all worked up about three songs ago anyways.
And the From the Basement performance fixes this, both by achieving execution and slotting the song into a much more rewarding context, ironically Thom chose the songs placement merely as a response to the question "uh what haven't we played yet?". Perhaps his response carried some forethought, we'll never know for sure but its hard to argue with Separators place in the FTB performance as a midpoint between two halves of the album. It closes an arc in the first half and lyrically makes sense in the middle - the lines about being free of some great burden and a woman blowin his cover lead into Lotus Flower and out of Feral quite well (all three song that lyrically tie in to In Rainbows conflict of infidelity and love. Resolve to open relationship doesn't come more clearly than "I'm not yours and your not mine and that's all right please don't judge"). Phil and Clive keep it just like the album here - minimal variation on the beat and Colin is moving but staying directly at the center of focus around an uncharacteristically major setting.
It's easy to see why it'd be a closer in theory - it has the quality of being the Anti-RH song that defines many of their album closers. It's cut from a slightly different cloth than the rest, in this case emotionally it's far more upbeat and resolute than most of their material. This is in part because of Colin's obvious harmonic input and the clarity of the drum sample (the studio version avoids any variation whatsoever - a statement perhaps in contrast to the polyrhythmic, ornamented percussion onslaught of the first five tracks). They play around with it a lot more on the tour which is cool too. The acoustic version from the Corn Exchange suggests the songs genesis was looping a guitar, which has become an effective mode of writing for Mr. Yorke although he's just as likely to begin to despise it as soon as it becomes too comfortable. Of course, the end here feels incomplete without the grand guitar wash outro - three days ago I might have ranked this song the lowest yet but I forget how uniquely resolute that ending is. I like it for now.
7.5/10
Pyramid Song (10) Airbag
Where I End And You Begin (9.5)
The National Anthem (9) In Limbo
Karma Police (8) Everything In Its Right Place A Wolf At The Door
Separator (7.5) Electioneering Little By Little
Fake Plastic Trees (7) Jigsaw Falling Into Place Videotape
For some reason I had LBL under some sevens when I clearly proved it was .5 better than that.
Ugh, I wish they gave more time to edit. My super late night writing makes me sound like an insane person. Or a foreigner.
I'll definitely do Separator tonight and try to kick this back into high gear on my open saturday - production petering out is also the death knell of a B8 writing project.
Other than Jonny unleashing his persona everywhere the song is very straightforward, relying almost entirely on the vigor of the bands performance to hold up rather than on the less fickle merits of cerebral awe that solidifies much of their later work. The studio performance is appropriately vicious, the distortion achieved here is white hot compared to any other tone on Ok Comptuter (or...their catalogue really). The live versions require a little extra Thom juice and a spankin tard-out solo closer to really sound special, Ed always contributes some nice vocals and Phil's energy is really gonna decide things as well considering how obvious his beat is. They have room to get dynamic here, in a relatively accessible way. It's a good song that is a little overshadowed by the broader scope of its peers, this is one that works outside the album context better than it does within, which hurts to say because it centralizes such a glaring flaw in my favorite album of all time.
7.5/10
Pyramid Song Airbag Where I End And You Begin The National Anthem In Limbo Karma Police Everything In Its Right Place A Wolf At The Door Electioneering Fake Plastic Trees Jigsaw Falling Into Place Little By Little Videotape
The one RH topic where I can't immediately rank everything, but I will say that anyone who put You over Planet Telex needs to listen to them back to back and seriously re-evaluate their opinion.
As for OKC re-workings, scrap Fitter Happer, make The Tourist the seventh song, CutW the eleventh song, close with Lift. I think that would do a lot to highlight the blistering immediacy of...
Electioneering
Studio version - Leno -
...seeing as how it would be framed as a brooding retort to the albums now expansive seventh-inning stretch and the supposed 'final fit' before the docile glow of No Surprises, instead of acting as a jolt of life after the negative experimental halt of Fitter Happer and retroactively being neutered by the one song that achieves Electioneerings' goal on this album better than Electioneering does. Of course, in my fantasy the album ends with Lift so the closing line is "lighten up squirt", Thom referencing himself instead of...Thom screaming like a madman. Which would be a great way to end the album, it's be really gripping but it would make the album a whole lot more depressing. But I do like the way The Tourist lyrically proceeds right into Airbag...maybe in the end I wouldn't change a thing.
The song's tumbleweed showdown intro is probably an Ennio Morricone nod, coupled with the title the stage is set for political showdown or as Thom has described it "a preacher ranting in front of a bunch of microphones". The persistent cowbell only fuels the satire of the political system, as the 'preacher' rants "when I go forwards you go backwards and somewhere we will meet" as separate guitars are simultaneously moving forwards and backwards it makes for a clever and biting indictment of a broken system in which political gain leads to lobbies being represented more than voters. And suffice it to say the IMF has done enough to merit contempt over its duration, though don't know where cattle prods specifically figure in. The imagery is all that's required, really.
Musically, this is about as "traditional rock" as it gets, Thom's simple riff is doubled by Ed and Jonny uses the opportunity to solo harder than anything this side of Paranoid Android. For once there's no rhythmic trickery at work here, the only significant harmonic interpolation comes in the form of the tremelo-picked breakdown, leading up to a classic Greenwood guitar frenzy of muting the down beat super hard right before letting that slicing chord ring out on the up beat. To this day nobody has mastered the art of muting a guitar like Jonathan Greenwood, something about his ferocity when shutting the guitar up is just as effective as making it scream out. He's a percussive player, in many respects.
Bump for now. I've watched musicologists argue over the definition of rock to the extremes of "anything without a guitar is rock" and "anything spawned in the 20th century onwards absolutely is rock", the science of genres is really anyone's game.
Ultimately the verses lock in after 48 beats, or 12 bars, allowing the listener to hear three sets of four bars or four sets of three bars, meaning the underlying math of the 4/4 and 3/4 on six bars juxtaposition has unlocked a parallel battle between threes and fours on a higher tier of musical structure - truly this song fractal-craps over everything else on Kid A, and to me that makes it pretty special considering that if you wanted to make a song intentionally disorienting you wouldn't necessarily need to make it mathematically clever. You could just make a bunch of weird jarring pointless noises in a random sequence and call that In Limbo, but to wield such chaos moment to moment in a juggling act veiling grander schemes? Certainly the 'Head were seeking a maximalist dare of a completely realized push in a new direction - in a way In Limbo is the Bloom of Kid A (It was recorded first, at least. Bloom being a statement of intent and In Limbo being the ultimate anti-statement of intent).
They've always had this song down live.I can't find a performance where they screw it up and there's plenty of about equal quality ones on the tube dating back pretty far...the Canal versions are definitive enough. And sometimes they don't make Ed hammer out that ridiculous keyboard intro which is a shame because its always fun to make the handsome one look silly. Jonny gets some really sick stuff in near the end, some of those echoed notes sound like seagulls in the distance as you're having a heat stroke out on your raft. Needless to say, his solos here are dischordia central (but not atonal, there's a difference) if the chord progressions weren't already twisted enough. Nobody makes Em sound more grim. CCCCOCOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMEEEEEE BAAAAAAAAAACCCCCKKKKK
You know when I see them next to each other I can't justify it over The National Anthem. Really tough call though. On a different day...
9/10
Pyramid Song Airbag Where I End And You Begin The National Anthem In Limbo Karma Police Everything In Its Right Place A Wolf At The Door Fake Plastic Trees Jigsaw Falling Into Place Little By Little Videotape
Originally titled "Lost at Sea", Kid A's seventh song retains its helplessly adrift imagery through music more so than lyric, despite Thom clearly saying "I'm lost at sea don't bother me" and referencing off-shore weather forecast radio channels "Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea, I got a message I can't read". It's a metaphor for the band at large being unsure of where to go next musically after the overblown success of OK Computer - writing OK Computer 2 was the last they wanted to do, and so they were stuck with a sea of possibilities and a captain who can't read the messages necessary for directions. Yorke's lyrical reflection of writers block or an inability to work out an idea stretches back to Stop Whispering: "and the feeling is that there's something wrong because I can't find the words and I can't find the songs" - to The Bends: "Where do we go from here? The words are coming out all weird".
But in another sense, it goes back to the very name of the band, Radiohead. I believe the name refers to the process of writing music - the brain tunes into chaos and channels form and figure. Or perhaps it is simply about receiving and interpreting the clearest musical frequencies, getting good reception. Whatever the case, Radiohead's radio heads were receptacles of fog and confusion during the OKC touring/Kid A writing phase, and so in a stroke of genius they penned a song characterizing the their unsure vulnerability (I'm on your side/nowhere to hide) in the wake of unrealistically heightened expectation.
In Limbo matches lyric to music perfectly. The drums roll out a swampy 4/4 while the guitar literally spirals down fourths in 3/4 for six bars through the chorus just after Thom falls through his trapdoor - Thom himself is throwing himself between rhythms, singing the lundy fastnet irish sea bit at 4/4, playing with 3/4 for the verses. Even Ed's plinky 3 note intro has its own unique vexing rhythm, though it can be heard in standard time with practice. This is not the last time Radiohead will use multiple time signatures to achieve an oceanic multiple current/wave effect, never again will it be done so nauseatingly. Now mind you about the bar lengths, it the guitars still sync up with the drums but because they are a bunch of evil bastards and made the guitars do only six bars in the chorus and eight in the verses they do it on a larger scale - Jonny's sixth bar ends just as Phil's third bar ends meaning he essentially fills up twelve phil beats with eighteen notes.
Here's a simple way to explain it, G and D being where the guitar and drum cycles restart, and | - - - is a 1-2-3-4 count following the drum beat, where the guitar bars are half that size.
Musical talent is a lot like athleticism in that a defeatist attitude will be a self-fulfilling prophecy - if you tell yourself there's no way in hell you can bust another just a few more reps or figure out that difficult part of the song you won't, if you tell yourself you can you will be far more likely to succeed. Even with god - many top tier athletes and musicians alike believe that god really is on their side about all that talent. There are people that use their god to fuel an unwavering self-conviction that never lets them stop training to reach their full god-given potential, and there are people that use their god to tell themselves they can't do something because they feel it apparent that god didn't bless them with some prerequisite gift - the only gift he gives is potential.
Music is not an 'innate talent', it is actually something you have to simply practice for years. If there's one thing that needs to die it's the idea that there's some kind of magic involved in musical talent that ordinary folks can't tap into - the dexterity is learned and the understanding is learned. The drive is internal. Anyone can do it.
Why was the pre-man drinkin that acid vial in the beginning? Did they really have to turn Dr. Halloway into a strong fast zombie? Was that necessary?
Also gotta appreciate the reckless vaginalization of the facehuggers. Geiger's sex/death motif never fails to excite, the cesarian section scene was classic.
Yeah I assume that too. To my knowledge hearing the subdivision of threes isn't technically any more correct than hearing subdivisions of four in your head given how swung the piano is, but then the swing is what gives people room to openly hear the thirds in the first place, apparently. So there could be something to it.
Upon review I never really explained about the beat structure, 3-3-3-3-4 is four triangles and a square, or the faces of a pyramid. That's all there is to get, really.
Thom's guitar enters I believe with Phil but it's initially pushed so far down in the mix it's hard to tell. That guitar part is how the song was originally written (this section of the song is decidedly in Amajor, playing off of B7 - F#m and Esus4 - Emajor) but it was intended to be left off the final mix and used solely as a guideline for the rest of the band to coalesce around - in the end the other members agreed the song sounded great with Thom playing along and his practice demo was used for the album. Conversely, Colin's teleporting bassline was laid down as a skeletal foundation with the idea in mind that he would figure out something to play in between later on - when he never did, the final product ended up making him sound more characterized, idiosyncratic, and downright jazzy than he ever did plodding along to the likes of "Bones", "My Iron Lung", et cetera. He did take bass lessons during The Bends touring, that might have something to do with his new creativity, but again wisdom seems to define this band just as aptly as creativity. He's playing to the laboriously programmed drum sample that required the space to be heard about the rhythm section - apparently this was a Selway/Godrich joint effort in the studio on a mac for two days and a drum kit for fifteen minutes. God I shudder just thinking about macs. But the hell they endured was worth it, their efforts supply a rhythmic confidence and exuberance that stays jarred but unscathed, which is really what an Airbag does, you feel incredibly lucky and shaken after using one.
And so muses Yorke's spacious vocal "In a jackknifed juggernaut I am born again, in an interstellar burst I am back to save the universe". By 1:15 all 5-6 members of the band are individually vindicated and creatively liberated. Course, Jonny wouldn't be content merely providing the intro so he soars over the song with a tremelo-picked, reverb-drenched eastern scale for a verse and a solo, and Thom comes back triumphantly to save the universe once again. Just when everything seems to come to a halt, guitars glitch out and drums sputter, the bass comes to life and demands the song keep moving. The mellotron informs some resolute sighing from Thom until the intro theme finally makes its way back into the mix and reintroduces the consistent shifts from Fmajor to Amajor, perpetuating an even cycle of introducing and resolving a minor conflict between C and C# but keeping major keys constant so the overall positive mood of the melody is never dropped, instead passed between two hands. No doubt Jonny penned this bit. The final A rings out and three aural dots punctuate the song like, well, an ellipses...
Thom's solo rendition on a nylon string plays up the song's Neil Youngish folksy quality. His voice sounds fantastic and focused, he even jams out a little bit near the end and busting into the straight up F and A chords at the end after keeping the intro in A was so effective thematically compared to the studio versions' emphasis on the tonal difference in the intro moreso than the outro. I actually just watched this after writing up the studio version, so I wouldn't have probably noticed as much if I wasn't just now sitting here figuring out how the album version all goes on a guitar. As for the live band version I'd have given one from this tour - they play it often but there aren't any videos that do Clive and Phil justice to my knowledge. And I doubt Thom has gotten more buck with it in 2012 than he did in Belfort. This is one where there's a million live performances to choose from and it'd be hard to go wrong with any of them.
10/10
Pyramid Song Airbag Where I End And You Begin The National Anthem Karma Police Everything In Its Right Place A Wolf At The Door Fake Plastic Trees Jigsaw Falling Into Place Little By Little Videotape
Studio version - Solo Coachella '10 - Belfort '98 -
Heroic, anthemic, explosive, Airbag is the opener of all openers upon the album of all albums. It's place in their career is a groundbreaking landmark, a new oil has been struck and will be tapped into from this point on in their career - although not one single aspect of the band could account for such a ramp up in quality, be it their whittling down to Nigel Godrich being the sole production influence, their tendency to want to escape their own sound, increased musical chops or sheer added wisdom, the band dynamic has assimilated newfound confidence AND freedom - one of the most difficult combos to achieve in writing music. What potential Pablo Honey and The Bends hinted at Airbag brazenly blows out of the water, immediately kicking the listeners ass and displaying entirely new structural concepts for every member's role in this band's sound, while retaining the same instrumental role as a 3-guitar rock and roll band (for the most part).
The song opens on E one note ahead of the beat before shifting into a distorted lullabye revolving modally on Fmajor and Amajor, Jonny's guitar alone would leave it a little dark and empty but the backing cello combines to give it a velvety, smoky character and the sleigh bells have got to be tongue-in-cheek but totally effective to Thom's idea of the song being about the intense feeling of relief and joy you get right after a near death experience. The bells evoke the wonder of christmas magic, perhaps George's revelation that an angel just got its wings and he truly does have a wonderful life and he doesn't wish he was dead after all. Ed's bristling guitar line arrives suspiciously at bar 7, Phil's manipulated jam snippet arrives at bar 11, and having the distinct advantage of knowing the song as a musically inept 14 year-old I can say that if even if you had no idea where to start counting, his intro in no way sounds unnatural. Alternatively, you could say the first E starts on the fourth beat of the first bar or it simply is the first bar and the bells/cello begin on the second bar, that way Ed technically starts at 8 and Phil starts at bar 12. Regardless, it's a conscious edit on the band's part to start the song on an off beat/bar. What they're doing A. coloring outside the lines, B. throwing you off, and C. subconsciously planting the seed that something is indeed different about this band - at 23 years of age I now note that Ed starts exactly on the ten second mark (OK Computer's working title was "Zeroes and Ones" for a long time, furthering the idea that Radiohead construct their music with respect and affinity for maths).
Yet again I digress. Fake Plastic Trees just does not grip me on its own merits people, the lyrics are definitely relatable but every bit about wearing people out I could do without. They scatter too many lulls about, in particular the one after the song has just built up and boiled over feels like such a drag to have to end the song with. The organ along with the band at the very end of the song would have been succinct right after the "If I just turn and run" finish. Maybe dragging it out was the point of it considering the lyric, but damn is it thematically draining. I do love Ed's addition to the song, some nice crystalline notes in octaved pairs - Jonny is frenzied as always and honestly he overdoes it sometimes live. There's a nice peak he hits on the album version, it feels like he responds to the crowd anticipation/reaction of him going wild with it after the song has put most of them to bed but it just doesn't always come off as genuine. Phil and Colin don't really get to do anything but fill the role in either the live or studio version which really speaks to the songs place in their catalogue, though their assistance through to the wonderful crescendo provides a good close to the first third of a three act album. A step forward in their career at the time, Fake Plastic Trees sounds a bit sappy and dated now. Its telling they haven't played it so far on this tour - it's too slow of a burner next to the next level material. That said, the song does boast some great emotion give the proper context and patience for music that sounds slower than it actually is.
And the video is kinda awkward and pointless. It's like I'm watching Thom being forced to mime his own songs to his dismay and mine alike. Why did we both just engage in that, Thom? Because of EMI, those bastards. They're the real magpie.
7/10
Pyramid Song Where I End And You Begin The National Anthem Karma Police Everything In Its Right Place A Wolf At The Door Fake Plastic Trees Jigsaw Falling Into Place Little By Little Videotape