Monthly Archives: February 2011
Review: Radiohead – The King of Limbs
The shape of the next Radiohead record was revealed in an interview for Familial, drummer Phil Selway’s modest acoustic side-project. The question: whether the album would be born from extensive touring and live experimentation as was the case with In Rainbows. ‘Uh, no’ was the chuckled reply.
It’s easy to see what was so funny. Where In Rainbows was conciliatory and sensuous, Limbs heralds a return to their stark post-Kid A textures: a part-Jazzy, part –IDM inspired and introverted sound that dispriviledged the guitar at every opportunity. Take album-opener Bloom: Greenwood’s hollow bass punctuates an ephemeral piano sample and a scattershot drum rhythm; where schoolchildren’s cheers would have lifted the mood on 15 Step, sky-bound strings and heralding brass only offer a monetary relief from the repressive murkiness. It’s a dark, in-ward looking opening, but once the layers are peeled off and examined – whirring tremolo guitar, Yorke’s reverberant croon – it’s a sumptuously cascading sweep up there with anything the band have done. Part of what made In Rainbows so bracing, a muscular, organic quality exampled by ‘Bodysnatchers’, is packed away (along with the guitars) in favour of the band’s unique brand of the post-millennial existentialist blues.
Officially the album stands as Radiohead’s eight full-length, but in reality it’s not quite there. The album as a medium of carrying music has always been troublesome for Radiohead; Thom’s ambivalence to making ‘long-play’ records is well known and, as the In Rainbows album cycle wound down, the group made noise about what exciting and innovative way they’d their work in the future. Middling tracks such as Twisted Words and Harry Patch were rushed out along with some ill-defined talk about how they might just release singles and EPs here and there when it suited them. Far from idle chatter from a band the world now listens to when it comes to release strategies, the difficult and well-documented Kid A/Amnesiac sessions bear out the sincerity of the message. For a band that hasn’t been shy in distancing themselves from rock convention, a less rockist delivery method didn’t seem that unlikely.
Coming in at a undernourished 37 minutes and eight tracks, The King of Limbs bears this discomfort unapologetically. The first four songs riff on their Warp influences, favouring kinetic energy and texture over melody and traditional song writing. Whilst the second half is a far more conventional affair where the organic, understated ballads the band made their name with predominate. It’s a messily paced album formed of eclectic elements, but far from the genius offcuts of a restless band, Limbs never really sees the group pushed out of their comfort zone; there’s never the feeling that they’re exploring new territory. The urge to shock and to re-invent is absent, and the result is something sometimes familiar to the point of self-plagiarism. The break in Little by Little sounds like an amalgamation of several Amnesiac tracks, Codex is a mash-up of every ethereal piano ballad the band have made their name with – Karma Police, Pyramid Song, Nude, take your pick – and lead-single Lotus Flower’s spasmic beats, only really offers a less nervy, more sensuous take on Idioteque – a good one, but still.
Obviously re-heated Radiohead is still better than most bands’ best. Alongside the aforementioned Bloom, Feral’s looming bass and off-kilter drums offers a convincingly Radiohead regurgitation of all those esoteric dubstep tracks Thom posts up on his office charts; the brass swell and funereal piano of Codex is very pretty if very familiar. Doing what you’ve done before isn’t the way to a poor album for a group like Radiohead; it’s just not the way to a great one either. When the band does misstep it isn’t down to bad songs, rather familiar or unpolished ones. Morning Mr Magpie features light, patterning and, you guessed it, syncopated percussion; three understated guitar lines intersect with one another and the beat, grounded by that ever present, mushrooming bass. The confluence of too many ideas eventually reaches a head when a second and just as shambolic drum beat ambles in accompanied by an electronic chime, creating a grating dissonance before the song fades out to bird chatter and static fuzz – an abandoned, half-successful experiment, nearly there, but not quite.
From a younger band Limbs would be promising pre-debut EPs, but from the celebrated ambassadors of the avant-garde it’s an unapologetically messy catharsis of ‘Radiohead-y’ tracks; the kind of album an established band puts out when they’re not that keen on going through the rigours of crafting big statements but still have creative itches to scratch. There are great songs that, though sometimes familiar, can sit proudly next to anything they’ve done. There’s also an equal amount of promising but unrefined ideas not yet polished into the diamonds we’re used to on Radiohead albums. That Radiohead probably meant to release a more informal record doesn’t excuse the unremarkable from a band that can do better.
7/10
https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/01-bloom.mp3%20MP3: Radiohead – Bloom
https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/04-feral.mp3%20MP3: Radiohead – Codex
I Can’t Take You No more
One of the prettiest tracks from last year’s highly approved Swim finally gets a video.
Nineteen Fifty-Four
I feel like I should cover more London artists, being from London myself. So here’s something I found on my travels by D. Paris who is someone I know nothing about apart from the fact that this track’s pretty good and he’s from London, according to his Soundcloud.
https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/1954.mp3%20MP3: D. Paris – 1954
We Can Make It Last
Obtuse idealism from Lupe rendered palatable by healthy dose of humour amongst the references to slave ships, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King (Fred Astaire as a b-boy, Eminem as hip hop pioneer) and those schmaltzy, glistening Disney strings that ground it firmly in a wistful daydream rather than naive political statement a la Imagine.
https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/01-all-black-everything.mp3%20I Feel Better
A new 8 minute cut of Far Nearer got revealed when Jamie XX took over 6 music Sunday night; tropical steel drums, woozy, disfigured vocals and springy synths galore.
And, from the same mix, there’s a decent enough cover of the Rui Da Silva house classic, ‘Touch Me’.
Check out his whole set over at iPlayer or download it here if you’ve got a spare couple of hours for an impressive garage, grime and post-dubstep mix.
Thanks to post-dubstep for the original rip.
In The Summertime
Some post-Dilla boom-bap doing more interesting things with voices, just got a shiny, kaleidoscopic new music video.
They’re Never Gonna Reach You
Missed this first time around, so here it is. A schmaltzy, if slightly absurd, way to close Valentine’s week*.
*That’s a thing, right?
Review: James Blake – James Blake LP
Though blurred, that James Blake on the cover doesn’t obscure the fact that the guy’s now a popstar of sorts. The album art isn’t new: we first saw the image, depicting Blake as a kind of split Jekyll and Hyde figure, on the cover of the Klavierwerke EP. The two records don’t share much in common, but it was obviously decided that it’d be silly not to have the boy on the cover for the main event. He’s pretty easy on the eyes, after all. And he sings.
Compared to the Kelis-sampling, R&B-obscuring pseudo-dubstep Blake announced himself onto the scene with, Blake is the sound of a personality creating music instead of chopping and slicing others. Where he was a producer, he’s now an artist –even singer-songwriter. Though it sounds like it through the vocoders, the pitch bending and the multitude of other electronic manoeuvres, the love songs that populate the album aren’t samples from other artists, other eras. It’s him singing in that clipped but soulful croon. Where earlier EPs traded in minimal abstractions and woozy club numbers, Blake has actual, traditional songs. The result is something that sits between blue-eyed soul and singer-songwriter pop.
What makes Blake interesting is the way that croon is employed. He sings, sure, but his singing is figurative and essentially does what his samples did in texture and purpose. On The Wilhelm Scream – notably a reimagining/cover of a (very yacht rock) song his father wrote – his voice loops ‘I don’t know about my dreams / I don’t know about my dreaming anymore’. It’s part communication, a world-weary sigh, but more purposefully – the lyrics, like the song don’t progress much beyond that – it ratchets up the song’s gradual build. Three minutes in and the song begins to rattle as if it’s about to launch into orbit; his voice climaxes similarly, gaining extra layers of cavernous reverb as it goes before falling down to the same mumbled sigh as the song returns to earth. Voice for Blake is just another instrument to be played with and manipulated for textural purpose; where he rummaged, through other’s recorded sentiment, he now performs a similarly mechanical process with his own – part human, part machine. On ‘I mind’ his cold tremolo croon is accompanied by a more mechanical, barely-vocal cry that weaves itself into the mix, imitating an oscillating synth riff; on To Care (Like You) helium, goblin-like cries punctuate the nocturnal skitter, reminiscent of the haunted voices that echo through the darkness in Burial’s Untrue. On an album so apparently conventional in many ways, it’s a strange, but neat trick to pull. The move to a broader, more accessible sound doesn’t feel anything like a compromise, rather a new challenge, and he’s very good at it.
Its strongest point – that deconstructive ability to redefine pop – is also a source of weakness. The hypnotic repetition of voice – not quite sample, not quite human; not quite hook, not quite emoting – can jar, and the quality of his songwriting – or, perhaps more accurately his reimagining – sometimes wobbles. Far from a ‘Heartbeats’ type transformation the cover of ‘Limit To Your Love’ isn’t far from the original. Take the sub-bass wobble and the nervy pauses out and you’ve got a typical ‘Live Lounge’ type cover. Both Lindesfarnes immediately sound live Bon Iver; the refinement of the piano vignettes, ‘Give Me My Month’ and ‘Why Don’t You Call Me’, places him not far from Antony Hegarty. Neither are unflattering comparisons and the songs, though some of the weaker cuts, hold their own. They just don’t feel as complete as a result. It’s as if he’s still finding his own voice, literally and figuratively.
A collection of pop songs that seem so familiar and are yet so strange and challenging is a rare thing. Blake may not be the revolutionary leap that changes everything; it’s more evolutionary step than great leap, drawing an ancestry back through Thom Yorke, Bon Iver and the like. That doesn’t make it any less interesting. This album is, afterall, getting airplay on primetime Radio One; being advertised on the underground; and championed in the kind of critic’s polls that tend to play it safe with Adele and Ellie Goulding. Commercially it may not be the coffee table dubstep album that introduces a wider public to genre – if they need introducing at all – but it’s a fine collection of intelligently thought out songs that show considerable promise for someone so young.
8/10
https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/13-you-know-your-youth.mp3%20
https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/10-i-mind1.mp3%20
MP3: James Blake – You Know Your Youth
MP3: James Blake – I Mind
I Made Mistakes
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy gets another lazy and unfinished music video. Rihanna’s breasts do not a great music video make. It’s a shame as there’s not been an album by a big label megastar more deserving of a proper promotional victory lap in recent years.
We’re never going to see a finished video for Monster either.
Also, I’m not sure if Hype Williams is paying homage to or just copying this:
In non-music-related, but still Kanye news: I don’t know anything about Kobe Bryant or Basketball (we have Netball in the UK but only girls play it) but this meta, grindhouse-y, Tarantinoesque* Nike ad is much, much better.
Adiós, Motherf**ker!
MP3: Kanye West – All of the Lights
* just noticed that, obviously, it’s Robert Rodriguez directed (Willis! Trejo!) – so more accurate to say Rodriguezesque.
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