This is a review I wrote of A Moon Shaped Pool when it came out. It's a tad over-written but I stand by it otherwise. It was written in response to a mate's piece which argued that OK Computer was their best album.
RADIOHEAD – A MOON SHAPED POOL (2016)
Radiohead – greatest band in the world? Almost certainly, and A Moon Shaped Pool is perhaps their greatest album to date.
OK, let’s qualify that because any ranking of art is suspect even if subjectivity can be thrown aside (which it can’t, with apologies to Nick Hornby). So by ‘greatest band in the world’ I mean the band whose vision is the most complex and ambitious, and by ‘greatest album’ I mean the album on which that vision is most successfully realised. Oh, and I have to like listening to it of course.
The journey from Creep to here has been a tentative one. There is a theory in literary criticism that we tend (in the Western world) to impose a linear narrative on events as a result of our Judeo-Christian heritage, even if the facts do not warrant it, and I am unapologetically going to do that. You see, I see OK Computer not as the Messiah who might one day return, but more as a John the Baptist figure (or perhaps Old Testament prophet) who foreshadows the majesty to come.
I always saw OK Computer as a staging post between the indie guitar-driven The Bends and the more modernist Aphex Twin-influenced Kid A, with elements of both and none of the purity of either. Amnesiac was a compromised vision, Hail to the Thief rekindled the fire with political fury, and In Rainbows took the vision to new heights with added melody. King of Limbs? One step forwards and two back – its raw dissonance sounded fractured and incomplete after its predecessor although the TKOL remixes underlined the exploratory nature of the sound.
And so we come to A Moon Shaped Pool, into which the disparate elements of the earlier albums coalesce and become a unitary whole. It’s In Rainbows with added complexity; the sharp edges and failed experiments of the King of Limbs have been revisited and remoulded and the experimental nature of the Radiohead sound has been pushed a little further while somehow maintaining accessibility and balance.
It’s not all perfect – the opening track is decent enough but doesn’t really fit with the rest of the album, Tinker Tailor is just weak, and True Love Waits is a disappointment after the live verison on I Might Be Wrong. But Daydreaming to Present Tense is an incredibly strong run of tracks (with Desert Island Disk and Numbers the highlights for me). There is so much to chew on here – I haven’t got a clue what the songs mean, and yet they are freighted with meaning; the style is so varied across the album as a whole and yet it is singularly that of Radiohead. I can’t think of any other band that even attempt to do what they are doing, and if they are indeed now done then it’s a pretty staggering body of work to leave behind.
"Jesus, this'll make you wanna drive into a wall..." and shook his head
