Everybody’s talking about it. This is one of the rare instances in which I am current with public musical concerns. I bought the new Radiohead album about a week ago and I must say that I was pleasantly surprised. I can’t seem to listen to it enough! I have been ambivalent at best with the last two albums but this one is holding my interest. Here are a few details about why.
Overall, this new album has a more human feel than the last couple, due to the strange presence of organic, acoustic-based sounds like guitars and real drums and orchestral strings. And the element that goes hand-in-hand with these? Dynamics. As I mentioned the last time I wrote about Amnesiac, this dynamism has been sorely missing from Radiohead’s output as of late, as their primary compositional method has obviously been computerized sequencing. A lot of the songs on this new album go from soft to loud and all points in between, thanks largely to real drums, a real room, and real cymbals. I’m discovering as of late how important cymbals are to the overall level of intensity for a song.
For me, this new, (well, old, actually), approach is displayed in microcosm on the song “Nude.” On this song you hear a lot of unoccupied SPACE between the phrases. A previous version of the band would have filled these spaces with digital bleeps and bloops. Another song on this album serves as a fine metaphor for where the band’s collective mind is at: “House of Cards.” This song, positively upbeat for Radiohead, starts with a comping guitar line that sounds like it could be any number of Jack Jackson songs. But all similarities to pop puff pastry end at the exact point that the wall of reverb and weird noises enter. And in my estimation, that has been Radiohead’s task for the last few years—a deconstruction of pop music by way of electronica. In my eyes, that’s completely cool, reasonable, and maybe even necessary. Which isn’t to say that I have to love the results. But with this album, they seem to be going about the task of rebuilding the wreckage, as all of the songs on In Rainbows are pretty much immediately accessible.
Some other random notes: “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”- sounds like the most beautiful Dismemberment Plan song ever written by Radiohead.
“All I Need”- only a band like Radiohead could deliver such a sweet, romantic sentiment couched in such creepiness. And I mean that literally and figuratively, as the idea of self-loathing, unfulfilled love was the glue that also held their first hit “Creep” together.
The songs “Faust Arp” and “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” feature sophisticated harmonic progressions and, as Amanda mentioned, a sound that hasn’t been associated with Radiohead for a long time—acoustic guitar.
Finally, “Videotape.” This is yet another weepy song, fairly simple and largely piano-led. But the genius of this song is the drum programming that acts as a foil to the insistent piano theme. The two drum notes are slowly ornamented over time, (a la a host of minimalist composers), and then finally give way to some start-stop rhythms that feel a little off-kilter. The tension this all provides is just marvelous! And I think it makes for a beautifully ghostly end to a great album.
Usually when I get my Merriam Webter Word of the Day in my email at work, it goes directly to the trash, but I had never seen today's word. Get a load of this...
The Word of the Day for October 19 is:
pasquinade \pass-kwuh-NAYD\ noun
1 : a lampoon posted in a public place *2 : satirical writing : satire Example sentence: The article, a pasquinade mocking the proposed education reform, generated a lot of mail from readers.
Did you know? In 1501, a marble statue from ancient times was unearthed in Rome and erected near that city's Piazza Navona. The statue depicted a male torso and was christened "Pasquino" by the Romans, perhaps after a local shopkeeper. It became a tradition to dress up the statue on St. Mark’s Day, and in its honor, professors and students would write Latin verses that they would then post on it. Satires soon replaced these verses, and the Pasquino statue became a prime location for posting anonymous, bitingly critical lampoons. In the mid-17th century, these postings became known in English as "pasquinades" (from the Italian “pasquinata”). The term has since expanded in usage to refer to any kind of satirical writing
I’m unwittingly discovering that the mid- to late- sixties were an awesome time for popular music. I’ve been a fan of Zappa’s Freak Out! for many years, as well as The Beatles’ music from Revolver and Rubber Soul all the way through Abbey Road. And I’ve been amused by Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn. But recently I’ve heard a couple more albums from the era that probably captured the zeitgeist just as well.
Coming out of nowhere for me was The Zombies’ Odessey (sic) and Oracle. I have come to an appreciation for sunny brit-pop over the years and it doesn’t come any finer than this album. The music on here harkens back to a time when songs were melody-driven and the piano was expected to lay down a beat as regularly as the drums were. The band is best-known for their massive hit “Time of the Season,” an admittedly infectious driving, funkish song that closes out the album. However, it may suffer from the old axiom that “familiarity breeds contempt,” due to it’s ubiquity on oldies radio. It sounds like an anomaly among the rest of the tunes on this album. Everything else on the album, I would classify as “baroque pop.” (Think: The Beatles “Penny Lane.”) There are thick background vocals, lots of piano and organ, the aforementioned highly singable, catchy melodies…all within twelve songs, each encompassing a world all it’s own. You know how a lot of albums kind of start to sound the same after the first couple of songs? This isn’t one of those albums.
And I forgot to mention one of the coolest elements…lots of mellotron! At the time, the mellotron was still a new-fangled device. For the uninitiated, it was an electronic keyboard instrument in which each key played a tape loop of its corresponding pitch. (In many ways, it was the precursor to sampling synthesizer technology.) It went on to be used all over the place in 70’s prog-rock and the two sounds you hear the most through the years are the strings and flutes. (Think: the beginning of The Beatles “Strawberry Fields Forever.”) One of the interesting limitations of the instrument that affected how musicians composed for it was the fact that the tape loops were only a few seconds long and they had to reset, so you couldn’t play very long notes. Which reminds me of the scene in Gigantic, the They Might Be Giants documentary, in which John Flansburgh relates how in the early days of the Dial-a-Song service they would have to use a lot of staccato sounds when recording songs onto the answering machine, because long notes would make the machine shut off as it heard those long notes as if they were a dial-tone. Interesting how the state of the science affects the state of the art…
Anyway, the string voice on the mellotron is an absolutely beautiful sound, bringing to my mind the sound of an electrically-charged magnetic ocean that has become strangely self-aware and has decided to create musical art. And The Zombies’ tasteful usage of this hip new musical instrument, (for the time), makes this collection of music, which lies somewhere between The Beatles, Beach Boys and The Kinks, that much cooler. For simultaneously you get instantly accessible melodic gratification AND experimentation with new types of sounds.
I deem this album an absolute classic, which doesn’t happen very often, and I highly recommend that you check this music out, but only if you like things that are cool!
I will be back shortly with another great album from the end of the sixties.
Saturday night I attended a fantastic OKC Philharmonic concert. The soloist was Renee Fleming, a soprano who apparently is a big deal. Now, I had never heard of her before. I’m not in the vocalist/ opera world. I’m an instrumentalist and barely even in the classical world, so singers tend to sound the same to me. But Ms. Fleming’s performance was unlike anything I’ve ever heard. “Voice of an angel” is cliché and inappropriate. Hers was more like the voice of an angel’s loving mother. The idea of a single voice filling up that huge hall (over a full orchestra no less), is amazing and I think I heard the two things about her technique, (apart from her “musicality”), that make her so revered. One, she had a lot of lower overtones in her timbre-which gave her a pleasant sound, even though she sings in high registers. And the other thing I had elucidated for me by a soprano friend was her equal tone in all the registers, which is apparently very difficult. (Everything vocal is difficult for old “two-step-range” me.)
There was a lot of variety on the program, as she sang some Mozart, faux-Handel, Puccini, Smetana, the famous aria “O mio babbino caro,” from the opera Gianni Schicchi, (the only one I had heard before), and some contemporary, jazz/pop-leaning stuff, among other things. Ms. Fleming also came across as very charming in her on-stage banter. A sense of humor and humility is always nice to see in supremely talented people. Also interesting was her comment about how English-speaking opera singers basically strive to deny their heritage to become European-- having to learn Italian, French, German, Polish, Russian, all with perfect diction.
Another notable phenomenon I observed from the outset was that the sold-out audience sang the national anthem really well. I heard lots of confident, obviously trained voices around me as I croaked out my own feeble attempt. And I connected the dots. That’s the kind of crowd you get when you feature a star soprano from the Met: divas in training, voice teachers and students, opera lovers…What a receptive, energetic crowd! They gave her a standing ovation going into intermission, and quite rightly so, I might add. And one fun moment was when she invited the audience to sing along to the second verse of “I Could Have Danced All Night” at the end of the programmed songs, before her encores. And again, as they sang, I heard that this was a very discerning group of folks.
All of this is not to mention the overtures that the orchestra played during the diva’s breaks—my favorite being Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Liebestod, a maddeningly beautiful exercise in the delay of resolution, apparently a blueprint for the “evils” of atonalism that would follow in later decades, which got me to thinking about how I often hear a certain animosity of those in the traditional classical world toward the music of the twentieth century and how that makes me feel a little bit hurt. The music of the serialists and all manner of other academics that I’ve never even heard of tend to get trashed frequently by people like conductors and musicians in this particular classical music world. I happen to like a little bit of experimentalism and music meant to be “interesting” or “provocative” mixed in with music meant to be “beautiful.” (However, my paycheck doesn’t come from appealing to the tastes of grey-haired folks with money to burn.) I also liked Massenet’s “Thais Meditation,” a lyrical violin showpiece for the new concertmaster.
And you can pretty much count on good old Eldon Matlick, the principal hornist, to botch an exposed passage on every concert and he didn’t let me down this time- flubbing one of the main themes of the Rossini overture to The Barber of Seville, which contains one of the most famous musical gestures ever committed to staff paper.
Anyway, all of this is to say that it was a wonderfully diverse concert of affective music-making and made me proud to be a human being.
Here is the video for my friend Steven Stark's song $20,000. Directed by my other Steve friend, Steve Kelley, it was my second time to be coerced into acting. The first was a long lost film in high school depicting Kafka's The Metamorphosis, in which I was to portray the monster. Filming was stopped after the first night when we almost burned down Steve's parents' house with a light.
But this project, filmed probably 6 or 7 years ago, now obviously available on YouTube, was actually finished and seen by other people.
You might be interested to see how I gained about 50 lbs for the part, a la Robert De Niro.
I recommend you check out Steven's music, he's quite an acoustic guitarist as well as a crafter of all manner of types of songs.
And check out more of Steve Kelley's stuff on YouTube by searching for: "vbv20"
As Queen said in "Flash Gordon":
Just a man with a man's courage
He knows nothing but a man
But he can never fail
No one but the pure in heart
May find the golden grail
