Fluxblog Weekly #66: Radiohead at MSG, 79.5, Half Waif, Body Language
July 28th, 2016
There Comes The Darkness
Radiohead @ Madison Square Garden 7/27/2016
Burn the Witch / Daydreaming / Decks Dark / Desert Island Disk / Ful Stop / My Iron Lung / Climbing Up the Walls / Morning Mr. Magpie / Pyramid Song / Bloom / Identikit / The Numbers / The Gloaming / Weird Fishes/Arpeggi / Everything In Its Right Place / Idioteque / There There // Give Up the Ghost / Let Down / Present Tense / Planet Telex / Karma Police /// Reckoner / Creep
• This was my first Radiohead show in a solid decade. This wasn’t for a lack of interest in that time, only that circumstances didn’t work out and I’d seen them many times over between 1996 and 2006. The band remain as great as ever, though I have mixed feelings about the addition of Clive Deamer as a second drummer on about half of the set. Deamer mainly plays on material from The King of Limbs and A Moon Shaped Pool, and helps Phil Selway recreate the dense rhythmic patterns you hear on songs like “Bloom,” “Morning Mr. Magpie,” “Ful Stop,” and “Identikit.” It’s very impressive to witness, though it doesn’t work quite as well as it does on record where they can have more control over the edit and mix. A lot of the time this just sounds cluttered and distracting from the other elements in the arrangement. It’s also a questionable way of showcasing the new material, which aside from King of Limbs leftovers “Ful Stop” and “Identikit” are focused mainly on Jonny Greenwood’s string arrangements and piano parts, floaty guitar parts, and ample negative space. Songs with prominent string parts, like “The Numbers” or “Burn the Witch,” had those parts either transposed to another instrument or cut from the arrangement entirely, which I think cheated them somewhat. I wish they had sidelined Deamer for this tour and brought along a small string section instead.
• Radiohead have always been good about playing a mix of songs from throughout their catalog, and this show in particular included at least one song from all nine of their records. (This is fairly unusual, mainly becausePablo Honey material is only performed on special occasions.) The oldest songs felt like rewards and palette cleansers in this set, but they played them with so much energy that they never felt like pandering. The impression I’ve always had is that they are very proud of what they accomplished on The Bends and OK Computer and enjoy playing those songs, but have largely avoided working in that mode since because a) they have other things they’d like to accomplish b) they’ve already written so many perfect songs in that mode that it’s sort of unnecessary to go back. The difference between the latter day Radiohead songs and the old classics is not so much inherent quality as where they place the emphasis of their craft. The ‘90s material is very streamlined and melodic, and in the context of the King and Moon songs, they felt so much more dynamic. Given how much is going on in a lot of those newer songs, this is pretty ironic. But it is certainly possible to make a song so busy or fussy that it can become inert.
• This was the first time I’ve seen “Planet Telex” performed since 1997, and I was overjoyed to experience that as it may be my all-time favorite Radiohead song. “Telex” and “My Iron Lung” were played in part as a commentary on how bleak the world can seem in 2016. That chorus of “everyone is broken, everything is broken” was extremely cathartic, and Thom Yorke slightly changing the breakdown of “My Iron Lung” to “if you’re frightened, you shouldbe frightened, you should be, it’s OK” felt very pointed and accurate in the wake of Donald Trump clinching the Republican presidential nomination. “Idioteque” also felt very of-the-moment in a rather unsettling way, but overall the darkest sentiments of the show were more like a shared sense of righteous anger and less about fear and hysteria. There’s a bit of hope in Radiohead now, and it’s clearly expressed in “The Numbers”: “The future is inside us, it’s not somewhere else…we’ll take back what is ours one day at a time.”
Radiohead “Decks Dark”
The first two weeks I had A Moon Shaped Pool were spent in Los Angeles, and the imagery of that city is now burned into my mind whenever I hear those songs. “Decks Dark” in particular reminds me of “June gloom,” and overcast skies over Hollywood in the morning. Pastel buildings, blue pools, and palm trees cast in grey light. Traffic and empty streets. I hear all of that clearly in this song’s eerie balance of stillness and restlessness.
“Decks Dark” is essentially the 2016 update of “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” but this time the aliens aren’t here to kidnap Thom Yorke and show him the beauty of the world from a distance, and their presence isn’t some secret he has to keep. In “Decks Dark,” their arrival is very much known as their vast spaceship has blocked out the sky, and everyone must go about their business trying to understand why and waiting around helplessly for something to happen – invasion, death, some transcendental experience, them just going away without explanation. This is a fantastic metaphor for undefined dread and depression, and feeling powerless in the face of everything you can’t possibly know or understand. But as dark as this gets, the most striking thing about it is how resigned it feels. What might have come across as terror in older Radiohead songs is rendered here as a cosmic joke with no particular punchline.
Buy it from Amazon.
July 27th, 2016
My Heart’s In A Cage Tonight
79.5 “ooo”
I have spent a lot of time immersed in music from the early ‘80s and late ‘70s in the recent past, and I can say with reverence, enthusiasm, and some minor degree of authority that this song could pass as a vintage mellow R&B cut from that era. There are some tells – there’s no analog aura to it, and I’m reasonably sure it was recorded and mixed digitally. But the keyboard and guitar parts have the right tone and style, and capture a feeling distinct to that era that’s often lost when contemporary acts do pastiche. I realize this can sound like I’m damning this song with faint praise, or judging it entirely on period accuracy, but I should stress that this is a gorgeous and well-crafted piece of music. There’s an odd blend of emotions here too – swirls of lust and longing, but also a strange sense of inertia.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
July 26th, 2016
Only The Very Best
Half Waif “Nest”
Nandi Rose Plunkett has a lovely voice, with a crisp vocal tone and refined inflection close to that of Annie Clark on the first two St. Vincent records. She could easily get by on the sheer prettiness of her voice, but she resists that all through her first record as Half Waif, twiddling the knobs to warp the texture and shape of it at sometimes unpredictable intervals. The distortion she puts on her voice doesn’t fall into typical categories of vocal manipulation – it’s not chopped and screwed, it’s not pitched up into chipmunk soul, it’s not off-the-rack vocoder or AutoTune stuff. It’s much more interesting and distinct, and a bit like when a good guitarist comes up with a particular distinguishing tone.
“Nest” shifts gracefully between delicate minimalism and carefully layered harmony in a way that evokes the contours and textures of a metallic sculpture. I can’t listen to it without imagining it as a shape, or in some moments, an absence of shape.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
July 25th, 2016
Images Flashing In My Mind
Body Language “Just Let It”
“Just Let It” falls at just the right spot on the curve of a trend that it simultaneously sounds fresh and nostalgic at the same time. This sort of bright and perky laptop indie pop has been going strong for over a decade now, but it’s still a young and developing genre. (Maybe we should have an actual name for it?) It doesn’t sound dated just yet, but there’s something in that main synth riff that takes me right back to…hmmmm…let’s say 2007? Maybe 2011? But regardless of chronology, the sound feels so joyful and young. I bet in the future, you’ll be hearing a lot of music that sounds a bit like this in tv and films to signify fun times in the late 2000s to mid 2010s. Maybe they’ll use Chvrches or Ellie Goulding or Purity Ring, maybe they’ll use this exact song. But it’s all that one specific and kinda ineffable ~feeling~, like the world is only lit with neon fluorescent lights.
Buy it from Bandcamp.