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Radiohead: A Moon Shaped Pool

Radiohead are only making records for Radiohead now and that’s totally fine, they’ve climbed the pantheon and earned their right to sit around peeling grapes. It’s probably not as relaxing as all that though, Thom Yorke has obviously been feeling a tonne of things lately and it’s leaking out all over the album. Well, it practically is the album.

A Moon Shaped Pool runs deep with self-referential allusions, isolation and intimacy. There’s something deeply reflective about it, as though they’re looking back on their lives, their loves, their memories; looking back at the product of the past they made and saying, this is how we feel about it now and whatever its value is, it’s grown tiresome. The album itself nearly feels exhausted, as though the effort of conception and sheer existence were completely draining. The attitude is almost listless, certainly wistful, and achingly despondent, but the sound isn’t; no, never the sound, though the pathos behind it this time out, the creative drive, seems to be a slow shaking of the head and a solitary tear leaking from rheumy eyes.

Even at its most passionate, like the piercing and relentlessly dire strings of Burn The Witch, or the escalating electrical pulse that defines Ful Stop’s spine, there’s a deceptive and distorted quality to it, something deeply at odds with the clear beauty of it all. It’s like looking into the very thing it’s named for, gossamer radiance in a rippling shimmer that’s both reflective and original, and feeling sad that it’s so lovely.

There are times and tracks that feel almost like listening to someone recount a memory they don’t really have or can’t quite recall. The Numbers plays as Romeo and Juliet by way of Paranoid Android; Identikit calls back to King of Limbs like a wilted Lotus Flower and despite the upbeat percussion, almost grandiose choral swell, and sharp synth deviations, almost typifies the unexpectedly somber undercurrent of the album.

There’s enough room in A Moon Shaped Pool to dissect every piece and beat in order to dredge up the past they were built on, though it’s probably unnecessary. In many ways this is the ‘best of’ the group never made, one they actually have control over, and is a finer summation of their trajectory than any compilation could ever be. In the end though, the value of the album will be defined by your stock in Radiohead. ‘All this love will be in vain,’ Yorke tells us in Present Tense, but A Moon Shaped Pool will only show you what you ask to see.

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BADBADNOTGOOD: IV

IV was leaked more than a month in advance of its intended release and you could make an argument against piracy out of it, but you shouldn’t because it really says more about the fervour of the fans waiting desperately to wrap their paws around any new material the group could provide, illicitly gained or not. Fortunately for them and the group itself, IV is a formidable release that will have surely used that extra time on the (black bit) market to cement itself in the jazz pop psyche and earn back some of the lost clams that torrents allegedly claim.

The Toronto quartet (née trio) rolls out their latest release in a low key but distinctly BADBADNOTGOOD way. The opener And That, Too. is almost a sinister stakeout, a prelude waiting to pounce on the album’s remaining ten tracks. From there the album only gets more, well, moreish.

Besides the un-enumerated Sour Soul (a hip-hop heavy, jazz jape platform for Ghostface Killah), this is the first album for the boys that truly features featured guests. Certainly it’s the first with vocal accoutrement and definitively the first with Leland Whitty (a previously regular contributor) as an official BBNG boy. Without being in on the jam it’s hard to say what kind of impact this actually had on the sound of the album but in many ways it feels like a welcome mat, a softball entry into BBNG territory.

In part, IV feels like a best-of featuring new songs or, more fittingly, old ideas made fresh by new friends conversing. Each track is so smooth and subtly segued that you could easily travel from one end to the other without realising you took the trip at all, though, by holding a up a map of their previous meanderings you can start to recognise familiar landmarks, not distorted but reassessed by time, exposure, and the shifting perspectives garnered from experience.

The second track Speaking Gently, for instance, looks at III‘s Kaleidoscope, but softly, as though through the wistful, sepia lens of time, becoming, in many ways, a revisitation of the old by the new, intentions and perspectives charged by an almost ruminatory reflection, and it’s certainly not the only reminiscent riff or refrain to feature on the album.

What’s truly new, however, are the vocals, well, at least for the BBNG boys as they are. The accompaniment is used sparingly, spaced with an overarchingly perfect sense of timing, and only cements the group as purveyors of almost anachronistically classic composition. The first of the three vocal tracks, Time Moves Slow featuring Sam Herring, has a timeless slow jazz vibe and harkens towards a Bill Withers by Thelonious Monk blend that is inescapably engaging. The Mick Jenkins beat, Hyssop of Love, is a hip hop aside that embraces every complimentary cadence and In Your Eyes with Charlotte Day Wilson is simply a beautiful, soul ridden example of songcraft that could play anywhere between here and yesteryear.

IV is not III and maybe that’s a sad sentiment considering how incredible III really was, but IV comports itself with a maturity and reflectively joyful sobriety that previous BBNG offerings only ever hinted at. Fans of the group’s previous efforts may not have their socks blown off, merely removed, darned and re-administered, and newcomers may only hear the smooth tinkling of soft background soul. However, those who listen, learn, and love, will find an album full of unadulterated pleasure, albeit in a key that seems too soft to touch, though if you let it, you might just find yourself being touched back.

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Miles Davis & Robert Glasper: Everything’s Beautiful

Everything’s Beautiful is reminiscent of the first time listening to Dilla’s Donuts, feeling like it was some inevitable thing, an immutable part of musical reality that always existed but didn’t yet have form, rock dogma copping a seminal load right in the face. Yes, Everything’s Beautiful feels that way in the beginning, but over the course of the album it gradually blossoms into something more akin to sitting in the lobby of a sex resort, and is, of course, exactly as awesome as that does or doesn’t sound to you.

The opener, Miles Davis Talking Shit, has a real Burroughs/Scott-Heron vibe to it, and while it’s interesting it’s also vaguely parodical and mildly misleading. It’s actually the first instance of a non-problem presented by the front of the album, the first three tracks aren’t really facing the same direction as everybody else. It’s not that they’re bad, actually they’re pretty dang good, it’s just when held up as a whole it feels as though a few of the feature artists are having different conversations than the rest of the crew.

These early tracks, Illa J’s They Can’t Hold Me Down and Bilal’s Ghetto Walkin (which are effectively different strains of the same refrain), and Phonte’s Violets, are more traditional hip hop affairs that don’t fare so well when held next to the more ambient, experimental and vaguely trap, chill-wave vibes on the other cuts. They work early on in context with the vocal open but get in the way a little as the album unfolds, setting up expectations for something that doesn’t exactly exist.

What does exist at the back side is a somewhat erotic set of surreptitiously sleazy soundscapes, and oh man, are they ever built to make you feel ways, especially when your guest list includes ladies like Georgia Ann Muldrow and the built-to-sound-sexy Erykah Badu, who can’t turn it off even when she delivers her track with a sort of cutesy, j-pop curl in the chorus and a lethargic reggaeton bent brought out by the (presumable) backing of a department store organ. Then there’s a second swing in the one-two soul punch, the John Scofield and Ledisi feature, I’m Leaving You, and boy, the bass on that thing is so thick and heady it feels like pushing through puberty all over again, the sexy-time feels are simply overwhelming even if the context is inappropriate.

While you could point to comparable genre trends, held against their inspiration everything on Everything’s Beautiful sounds wholly original The cuts manage to highlight not just each artist’s take on Miles’ work, but their respective approaches to creating work of their own. This diversity of songcraft and the incorporation of, “Original recordings into new collaborative soundscapes,” means that for some (mostly Miles purists) the beauty of the originals will be lost. That’s not really the point though, if you wanted to listen to Miles blowing his own trumpet then you have endless avenues to do so, but this is about modern artists reflecting Miles in their own light. It just so happens that most of those lights are shaded a sensual red and put out in a way that would make Roxanne blush.

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Underminer

Celia talked with pinched nasal certainty from behind her back teeth, the sound of concrete bees trying to make honey. There was always a distinctly petty greed underneath her boho-pharaoh eyeliner, a slakeless stare that manifested in morose mannerisms. She was always trying to dig things out of people. ‘Tell me about your dreams,’ she’d say. ‘How did you grow up?’ Not where but how. ‘I bet that hurt.’ A twisted harrow’s smile. Always digging. Sentimental treasures to be unearthed and polished into parsimonious jewels then wagered against the owners esteem. People were terrified not to love her.

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Ceasefires

Voices on the fringes of frustrated rage, accusations and concessions until we reach the calm inside an argument, not quite impasse but exhaustion. We haven’t shared eyes in some time and the absent contact crests about us as both shield and threat. Are you going to leave me? I say. She takes my hand and flattens it between each of hers. Twenty-four carats settle in the curve between knuckles, calculated frisson in an occupied hollow. ‘I could never do that,’ she tells me, sighing with the piquant firmness of an avalanche, ‘it’s going to have to be you.’

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Genteel

Sarah never shat with the door shut. The whole time we dated it was a debate. Well, I say debate, but it was just another grain in the shifting sands of unease and argument. ‘I get claustrophobic,’ she’d say from her seat. ‘What if there’s a fire and I still need to wipe? An open door saves time and lives.’ She had some kind of condition, multiple unlabelled and laboured conditions, really. In some ways I admired her neurosis, I always prioritise insecurity over my insanity. It must be hellishly freeing to let yourself be governed by those voices.

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Empathy

I go there because she always lets me cry afterwards, passively lets, and her detachment is a beautiful thing. She sleeps more often than not, reads if she’s still wound up, but never asks me why. Not once, not even after that first time. She doesn’t ask me to leave either, or stop. It seems cruel and isolating, it’s not, she isn’t shaped that way, her lack of action is acceptance. I don’t love her, but I love her for that. In the dark, after I’m done, we hold hands beneath the covers and dream separately, lying isolated together.

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Timing

‘That was fast,’ she says. I tell her I’m sorry, but she just laughs. ‘I meant me.’ I hadn’t noticed, or I had but I’d been so concerned about being good that I didn’t realise I’d done so well. I just want you to be happy, I tell her. She twists around and kisses my forehead. ‘I’m totally content.’ I really want to believe her and stop hating myself. When we’re together, I very nearly feel like a good person. We can go again if you like? ‘I’d love to,’ she says, ‘but my boyfriend will be home soon.’

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Idiomatic

Thick in a handsome way, Greg from customs makes forceful eye contact and doesn’t smile. His voice is a well trod boot. ‘Anything to declare?’ He says. I had a great time, I tell him. I’m not sure how I’m going to go back. ‘I can have you detained,’ he tells me. ‘Searched and otherwise inconvenienced, right?’ Worn leather pressed liberally. Sorry, I say, you don’t get much chance to be funny when nobody speaks your language. Greg chews the skin of his inner cheek and arrives at a grimace. ‘Seems to me you didn’t miss much being away.’

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Purpose

I like watching the old men smoke on the Shinkansen, there’s a certain furtive elegance to it. Not quite nonchalance but something akin to devil may care. ‘Nationality doesn’t matter,’ Tanaeda-San says, ‘culture is only the tiniest artefact, it’s a trait that grows over time or is embedded in youth.’ I’m not so sure, I tell him, our elderly carry themselves differently, almost fearfully at times, their retirement seems almost a gamble. ‘So so so so so,’ he says, and turns to watch his country sliding by the cabin window. ‘Then perhaps they need to consider not stopping.’

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Inscrutable

Kaori looks at me with abject innocence and something wistful I can’t pin down. I wish I knew how to talk to you, I tell her. I wish I could share something of myself with you and you with me. ‘Wakarimasen,’ she says, but I don’t understand. We listen to the cicadas chirrup for a while and I can’t help laughing at their joke. She smiles and pats my hand, a gestural lament that carries something I still can’t grasp. I want to speak, but Kaori presses a finger to my lips and opens her palm beneath the horizon.

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Dysmorphia

It’s a strange expanse of introspection, but I get bummed sometimes that I haven’t killed myself yet, like it’s just another unrealised dream. Problem is, I was born with the ambition of a much more talented person, somewhere out there is a should be physicist blissfully calculating tax returns and enjoying my ignorance. I feel indentured to an amorphous personal dissatisfaction, a sense that whatever I accomplish will never be as good as I know it could be were I not me. Not that I want to be someone else, just that I’m not the me I never am.

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Ensconced

The gap is insurmountable. I don’t even speak, knowing the space is too thick and vast to carry meaning, all she might hear is some mewling that won’t even carry the conscious fidelity of echo. I lay a hand sometimes, in opportune occasions, upon bared skin betrayed by movement, always so soft and impenetrable. I’m allowed to feel then and the joy of it is dark enough to lose myself inside. I would cry out, to be chastised for my childishness, but it would only bother and I love her too much to dare disturb the wall she’s built. 

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Ward

Lilly came barreling up and threw herself on my lap. I had to start tickling her, it’s in the mandate, so I got right in under her armpits and made her squeal. It’s a gorgeously ugly sound, giggles and gasps mixed with abridged shrieks, the most pure thing I’ve ever experienced. I recorded it on my phone once, so I could keep her close. It used to be that I would listen to it whenever I was down, but I don’t have to anymore, it’s enough knowing that she’s in there, her innocence digitised and protected from the future.

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Exsanguinate

I wish my skin were hers. I pry beneath her wrist, slipping my nails into subdermal territory. She doesn’t flinch. I think I’m not there so I squirm. The pain she notices, an irritation. ‘What are you doing,’ she says. Love, I say, love, over and over until the words are in her veins. Love, love, love, love. ‘Stop,’ she says, ‘you’re full of shit.’ And I let her say it because of smiles, but she doesn’t realise how much I give away and what flows in to fill the void. Love, I say, and listen for a pulse.

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