560: A MOON SHAPED POOL | RADIOHEAD
This is the first album to come over to the 1000 from The Newer Albums section. I was so glad to have found parking for it. Here is the writing I did on it over the last 4 years:
Album Release: 5.8.16 - This review: 8.16.17
Like the great Stanley Kubrick Radiohead is far from prolific in the frequency of their releases. Many years pass between their monumental albums. But when they do show up…wow.
A Moon Shaped Pool has been in regular rotation on my turntable and in my car since it’s release a year ago. I am only now writing this in September of 2018. I was intimidated. How could I convey it’s brilliance. How do I write about the complex layered craftsmanship of a Radiohead record. So I decided to keep this simple and short: …Mostly Pool is a more somber album than their others.
4.4.20: It stays here for another year. But eventually I am gonna have to find parking for it in the 1000.
10.19.20 It made the list! The first album from the Newer Albums section to make the Top 1000. For now it sits in the 600s. I am sure that, over time, it will move on up.
Jayson Greene at Pitchfork: Radiohead, who titled their ninth studio album A Moon Shaped Pool, have a unique grasp on how easily profundity can slip into banality. Their music is obsessed with the point where great truths harden into platitudes, where pure signal meets wretched noise. In the past, Thom Yorke has sharply peppered his lyrics with everyday cliches to suggest a mind consumed by meaningless data, but on the new album, he largely moves beyond cynicism. He is now considering simpler truths in a heretofore-unexplored register: wonder and amazement. “This goes beyond me, beyond you,” he sings on “Daydreaming.” “We are just happy to serve you.” There is no concealed razor under Yorke’s tongue as he offers this thought, or in the pearly music that surrounds him. It sounds for all the world like the most cloistered and isolated soul in modern rock music opening up and admitting a helplessness far more personal than he’s ever dared. Yorke has flirted with surrender before, and on A Moon Shaped Pool, that submission feels nearly complete.
The album is framed by two older pieces of music that act as gateways to the darker, unfamiliar waters within. Opener “Burn the Witch” has been floating around, in some form or another, since Kid A. “This is a low-flying panic attack,” Yorke announces, explicitly linking to the bad old days of air crashes, iron lungs, and wolves at doors. (In fact, several of the song’s lyrics—“avoid all eye contact,” “cheer at the gallows”—first appeared in the album art to 2003’s anti-Bush polemic Hail to the Thief.) Meanwhile, Jonny Greenwood’s brittle modernist string arrangement reinforces the angst, turning the orchestra into a giant pair of gnashing teeth. It’s a vintage splash of Radiohead stomach acid, a cloud of gnats unleashed in your cranial nerves.
It also feels like an exorcism for what follows: a plunge into something scarier than the military industrial complex, or the insidious nature of propaganda, or human nature’s disturbing tendency towards unquestioning obedience. Yorke separated from his partner of 23 years and the mother to his two children last August, and on “Identikit,” he sings “Broken hearts make it rain” and “When I see you messin’ me around, I don’t want to know.”