"The future is bleak, the past is far away, and the present is heartbreaking, but we still have it." From Radiohead's ninth studio album, A Moon Shaped Pool, this idyllic album that at first glance looks like a little fresh may carry the darkest monologue the band has ever made.
The entire album conveys Radiohead's worries about environmental destruction, the collective unconscious, the cooling of love, and how to find a way out. In the song "Ful Stop," Thom Yorke sings, "You're really messing things up." The song is also one of the few fast-paced songs on the entire album, but the eager beat creates a frightening atmosphere rather than a joyful little song.
On this album, the gorgeous background music is followed by cold notes: a gentle piano and an acoustic guitar reinforce the momentum with a string ensemble. The scattered clanging sound and the seemingly innocent whispering subconsciously shrouded the music with an ethereal halo. However, we all know that this is Radiohead, and their essence is deeply rooted in the fear of music. Throughout the series, "A Moon Shaped Pool" is like a nightmare sleep song. For example, in the song "Daydreaming", with the calm and undulating piano waltz, Yorke shallow sings: "The wood has become a boat, the big mistake has been cast, it is too late." Another example is the album's opening song "Burn the Witch", which gives people a spiraling sense of tension, and the rapidly staggered sweeping strings add to uneasiness and anxiety, vaguely portraying a society that is blind to political persecution.
"Beyond the point of no return
and it’s too late,
the damage is done"
Through the whole album, we can see the state of the world and the singer's heart take care of each other and merge into one. In Idenikit, Yorke sings, "When I see you doing something around me, I don't want to know at all. Is he implying individual, political, or group betrayal? Or simply describe the situation in which the suspect's facial expressions and features may be distorted and misidentified during the identification of the offender? We don't know. Even through the Beatles chorus that appears later in the song, "Broken Hearts Make It Rains", it cannot be speculated.
The song is a bittersweet bossa nova style, similar to Radiohead's previous "Knives Out" "House of Cards" genre. Yorke sang: "My world is collapsing, I will dance, I will be confused, as if all love is an emptiness?" ”
Yorke, 47, broke up peacefully with his partner of 23 years, Rachel Owen, last year. At the end of the song "Daydreaming", there is a repeating recitation: "Half my life". But we shouldn't simply think of these songs as the singer's autobiography. Because in the process of crafting this album in the studio, both Radiohead and Yorke herself have publicly performed the album's songs on many occasions, such as: "Identikit", "Present Tense", "True Love Waits". "Burn the Witch" has also been rumored to be released for nearly 10 years.
Every hiss and squeak on this album has been carefully choreographed and considered. The album took five years to produce, which is one year longer than the rule of four years to produce a new album. Radiohead now works slowly, with band work interspersed between Other Orke's own projects, along with guitarist Jonny Greenwood's personal soundtrack schedule and other collaborators' schedules.
The collaboration between the members creates exquisite music that blends Yorke's ambiguous lyrics with evocative melodies, Greenwood's chord arrangement after interpreting the lyrics, and the understated and indelible contributions of the rest of the band. Yorke and Greenwood are perfection-driven listeners, obsessed with melody, passionate about exploring idiomatic phenomena, and passionate about creating sensual riddles.
Radiohead is also no longer afraid of electronic technology. Radiohead released "OK Computers" in the 1990s to protest the invasion of individualism by electronics. But in Radiohead's current music, electronic technology is just a tool, not a protagonist, nor is it the focus of fans. "A Moon Shaped Pool" is an album that uses a lot of electronic technology to complement human activities. Somehow it was made, so that the sounds in the whole album are mostly vocals and onomatopoeia: lazy, noisy and wandering outside the beat. "Daydreaming," for example, opens with a series of analog sounds that sway like a tape from a slow turntable. Electronic Technology is only responsible for the acoustic guitar, keyboard, percussion and vocals. Whether some songs are made through an onomatopoeia device or not, they don't have a negative impact, just as common as using microphones and amplifiers. There are even songs that you can easily tell are made by electronic technology, but they sound like an unplugged version.
Now that Radiohead's style dates back to the '60s, "A Moon Shaped Pool" is, in part, a psychedelic ballad. "The Numbers" (formerly known as Silent Spring) reads: "We come from the soil, and we will eventually return to the soil, and we will take back everything that belongs to us." Sounds a bit like a battle order. The song seems to be a tribute to Buffalo Springfield's 'Expecting to Fly' and is filled with solemn guitar sounds and frantic sweeping strings. The song "Desert Island Disk" echoes the jazz ballad that Pentangle experimented with that year. Lyrics: "The wind passed through my heart and tore open a gully. "There's a bit of Tim Buckley's early electronic psychedelic flavor. This song is one of the few pieces of music on the entire album that reveals a glimmer of hope, interpreting the thrill of real existence and complete release. "Glass Eyes" opens with a gloomy ballad, and the lyrics partly sing that when the protagonist arrives in a strange and nameless town, the piano music seems to dissolve into a fog. In the end, the protagonist finds an exit to the bottom of the mountain, but the man does not care whether the road really works or not.
The album ends with "True Love Waits", a love song written by Radiohead in the '90s, which was released in the 2001 live EP "I Might Be Wrong". Yorke's casual singing was filled with a depressing plea: "Please don't leave, please don't leave." Twenty years later, the studio version of the song proved to the world how high Radiohead's perfectionism can go. Unlike the previous version of the guitar chord opening, this version uses four repetitive, disconnected piano notes to complete the first bar, gradually adding more piano notes, like a babbling water cycle, a low and loud tone plus a repetitive arrangement, accidentally mixed with a harmonious and forgetful mood - this is a world beyond the desires of mortals, and it is also protected from the erosion of mortals.
Compile /Aloha
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