“Try this. You like weird stuff.” Some years ago someone gave me a collection of “weird stuff”. Moody and noisy. I call them soundscapes. And the new Radiohead album comes pretty close. This is an album you want to play loud with headphones as you walk through your dreams or nightmares to try to figure out something.
The audio cues are like trance dancing material. They must have had fun in sound design. ‘Burn the witch’, ‘Daydreaming’ and ‘Decks Dark’ set the stage like that before ‘Desert Island Disk’ comes along with it’s acoustic guitar as anything vaguely ‘normal’. Oh, wait a minute, there goes that one too down the dreamy, stoned world of sweeping background sounds. It is as if whenever anything sounded familiar they worked on it until it didn’t. “Identikit” starts like a studio out take and turns into an anthem of something, anything you want it to.
This is more like a trip through space or an ocean voyage. The fog lifts occasionally briefly and then reappears. Vocals ranging from a greek “moiroloi” style chants, to whinging, whining, painful, thoughtful, pensive rants. If you are looking for a hit single, don’t bother. This isn’t an album, it’s a disease. You hear it once and then you want to hear it again.
Whatever planet these guys have lived on for the past years making this album, heck, I want to live there with them.