Official RADIOHEAD thread

[tpfkabi]

is Spooks still under 2 minutes?

someone mentioned that new one, All I Need, reminded them of that Primitive Radio Gods song and i can kinda see it.

[Pubrick]

*Some weirdo tried to pick up on me during "Pyramid Song." I declined.

yeah, sorry about that. i can see why you'd be weirded out..

i was like

[grand theft sparrow]

I have no complaints, not even regarding the setlist, which omitted many of the songs that I originally "really want[ed]" to hear.

yeah your setlist was still about 1000 times better than mine.

Though not quite as good as mine.  ;)

[JG]

hop on over to this site http://www.youaintnopicasso.com/

where you can grab a zip of this setlist, which, as they explain, "is considered one of the band's best in recent years. The setlist was near-flawless and the band were energetic and, dare I say it, playful."

Radiohead @ Bonnaroo (6.17.06)
01 There There
02 2+2=5
03 15 Step
04 Arpeggi
05 Exit Music
06 Kid A
07 Dollars And Cents
08 Videotape
09 No Surprises
10 Paranoid Android
11 The Gloaming
12 The National Anthem
13 Climbing Up The Walls
14 Nude
15 Street Spirit
16 The Bends
17 Myxomatosis
18 How To Disappear Completely

Encore 1:
19 You And Whose Army?
20 Pyramid Song
21 Like Spinning Plates
22 Fake Plastic Trees
23 Bodysnatchers
24 Lucky
25 Idioteque
26 Karma Police

Encore 2:
27 House Of Cards
28 Everything In Its Right Place

i haven't really gotten into radiohead yet (although my friend is burning me kid a and ok computer as we speak) so i don't know if that setlist is as good as they say it is, so you decide. 

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

That's a long ass first encore.

[MacGuffin]

A CONVERSATION WITH ...
Thom Yorke, free agent
Radiohead's frontman goes solo -- but don't call it that -- with electronica 'Eraser.'
By Ann Powers, Los Angeles Times



LAST year, Thom Yorke was supposed to unwind. Radiohead, the band whose decade-long ascent has turned the singer into pop's definitive reluctant visionary, was on hiatus after a protracted cycle of recording and touring. Yorke was savoring the retreat from what he wryly calls "making RECORDS, in big capital letters," and the chance to reacquaint himself with his Oxford home, his longtime partner Rachel Owen and two young children. But instead of clearing a space for calm, Yorke found himself up to his neck in new thoughts.

"At my house, there's a room about this size," Yorke said, gesturing at the spacious suite in San Francisco's Clift Hotel where he sat discussing "The Eraser," the album he's releasing on July 10. "The entire room was just covered — the whole floor, with notes and scraps of paper. A friend of mine came by just before we started recording, and he was just looking through it, laughing his head off, saying, how are you going to piece this together?"

Yorke's workroom mess, mirrored by the sonic "bits and bobs and shreds of all sorts of random chaos" on his laptop, gave him a sense of freedom he'd momentarily lost within Radiohead, which lands in L.A. for two nights at the Greek Theatre starting Thursday. In league with two longtime collaborators, the visual artist Stanley Donwood and producer Nigel Godrich, Yorke enclosed himself amid these fragments, shutting out other influences. "That's how you get that thing where a project has its own universe," he explained. "You say, well, everything in this room, that's all there is, that's all I've got."

The fruitful little island of disarray contrasted radically with the high-stakes mood surrounding Radiohead's most recent chart-topper, 2003's "Hail to the Thief," which left the band seriously in need of some elbow room. Made quickly, during a time when Yorke was becoming deeply involved with the environmentalist group Friends of the Earth, "The Eraser" is a return to focus for Yorke, whose energy had flagged under the weight of his band's outsized reputation.

"It was done in the context of Radiohead," he said, adding that he initially dreaded telling his bandmates he'd embarked on the effort. "The best thing about it was that it wasn't a problem. Of course it was fine. Why wouldn't it be?" That the band dynamic "is a liquid thing is very important."

On its current tour, Radiohead is playing a wide swath of favorites plus some exciting new material, perhaps enriched by the confidence Yorke says he's regained by making "The Eraser," which will be released on the super-hip independent label XL. Radiohead is one of pop's highest-profile free agents, having parted with EMI, the conglomerate that released its previous seven albums. "The Eraser" could be viewed as part of a larger move toward independence.

Asked whether Radiohead would consider distributing its next album independently, Yorke unhesitatingly said yes. "We have two or three options, and that's one," he said. "Once we finish whatever we think is good enough to put out, then we'll start thinking about it. We haven't discussed it a great deal. I would love for us to drop a chemical weapon within the music industry. But I don't see it as our responsibility, either."

In the meantime, there's "The Eraser" — a project the labelresistant Yorke hates to label "solo." What began as a side trip into the abstract electronic music he loves became, to the singer's surprise, 40 minutes of remarkably powerful and direct music. Sure to be one of the year's critical and cult favorites, "The Eraser" is an evocative portrait of life made slippery by urban sprawl, murky political alliances and global warming — and given hope through individual and communal resistance — with the blips and bleeps of Yorke's laptop excursions coalescing into soulful, politically charged songs.

"It started out with loads and loads of beats and la la la," Yorke said, mocking his own obscurantist tendencies. "It was pretty intense and very, very heavy." Yorke's busman's holiday gave his producer a chance to highlight Yorke's poignant tenor and melodic sense. "In the midst of it all there were two or three things that made Nigel and me go, ooh, there's something really direct here. Someone might even understand it the first time around."

"In the band he's always finding ways to bury himself," Godrich said in a phone interview. "Being a big fan of his voice and his songs, I wanted to push that. It would have been sad if he'd just made an oblique record. But because it was predominantly electronic, I had a really good excuse to make his voice dry and loud."

The leap beyond the band context might easily have led Yorke into murky territory. A fan of experimental electronica, the singer first came up with a collection of tracks that didn't really reach out. "It made complete sense to me, but there wasn't enough there for anybody else," he said of these early efforts. But the desire to meld his voice with the computer's led to unexpected intimacies.

"The music, no matter what way you look at it, is coming out of a box," said Yorke, noting that even the acoustic sounds of piano, guitar and bass "The Eraser" samples are computer-processed, and he cites Björk's 1997 electro-torch suite "Homogenic" as a primary reference point. "It has its own space. We consciously decided to not expand it beyond that. The vocals are exactly the same, right there in the speakers. The record was built to be listened to in an isolated space — on headphones, or stuck in traffic."

The traffic reference is no casual one for Yorke, whose concern about the environment nearly caused him, at one point, to "flip my lid." Its songs send up warning flares that are cosmic in scope, yet movingly personal — the sonic equivalent of a hand held up to a tidal wave. That's an image Donwood included in "London Views," the "apocalyptic panorama" inspired by "The Eraser," which makes up the album's cover art. One of the linotype's most powerful segments depicts King Canute, the legendary English monarch who proved the limits of kingly power by trying and failing to command the ocean. The tale inspired Yorke's flood of lyrics too.

"In the paper one day, Jonathan Porritt was basically dismissing any commitment that the working government has toward addressing global warming, saying that their gestures were like King Canute trying to stop the tide," Yorke said of the British environmentalist. "And that just went 'kaching' in my head. It's not political, really, but that's exactly what I feel is happening. We're all King Canutes, holding our hands out, saying, 'It'll go away. I can make it stop.' No, you can't."

Such "not really political" talk has become tough for Yorke to resist, despite his desire to stay in the artist's traditional spot above the fray. "The Eraser's" most controversial song is "Harrowdown Hill," named after the Oxfordshire neighborhood where authorities found the body of Dr. David Kelly, a whistle-blower who allegedly committed suicide after telling a reporter that Tony Blair's government had falsely identified biological weapons in Iraq.

"I called it 'Harrowdown Hill' because it was a really poetic title," he said. "To me it sounded like some sort of battle, some civil war type thing. Finishing the song, I was thinking about the 1990 Poll Tax Riots — another of England's finest moments, when they beat ... protesters, and you know, there were old ladies there and kids with families. I didn't expect that many people to realize that Harrowdown Hill was where Dr. Kelly died. I'm not saying the reference isn't there, but there's more to it."

"Harrowdown Hill" makes its point through startling sounds and shards of emotionally charged speech; it's as political as a private, even secret, moment can be. Its startling beauty is typical of "The Eraser" — which, like all of Yorke's best work, finds its strength in the spaces where words and music dissolve, only to form something new. Literary types might call it poetics. For Yorke, it's all about hearing the world through the individual voice.

"I have friends who were involved in the tsunami," he said. "Talking to them, you realize that no matter how huge or terrifying an event is, you're not going to grasp it from the newspaper; it doesn't even matter if you see the wave on television. The only way you can actually relate to it is when someone explains their experience, one to one."

[MacGuffin]

Tour winds down, and Radiohead loosens up
The British rock band ends its North American jaunt at the Greek, and it plays with noticeable passion.
By Richard Cromelin, Los Angeles Times



Radiohead's mobile music laboratory rolled into Los Angeles for its final experiments Thursday, nearly a month after it kicked off its North American schedule in Philadelphia. Its two tour-closing nights at the Greek Theatre concluded the iconoclastic art-rockers mission of road-testing new songs intended for an upcoming album.

In doing so, the band is disregarding the conventional wisdom that audiences have no patience for unfamiliar material. But then conventional wisdom doesn't apply so much to Radiohead, which has released enough uncommercial music to ensure that its audience is purged of casual fans, leaving those who relish being challenged by the band.

Pretty much, anyway. There might have been a few murmurs of discontent Thursday, at one point prompting singer Thom Yorke to explain that if they weren't doing new songs, they'd still be at home. Overall, though, the sold-out crowd was appropriately attentive and involved, perhaps realizing that this was an opportunity to be savored, and one that could never be duplicated.

Radiohead dropped eight new tunes into its 23-song set, and if a few weeks on the road have worked any change, it was primarily a looseness in music and manner. The exotic "15 Step" seemed more naturally sinuous, and "Nude" and "Down Is the New Up" elicited a light, swinging touch from the band (light and swinging for Oxford art-rockers, anyway). The newest entry was the ballad "All I Need," which made its debut at a Chicago concert last week.

Yorke was also more outgoing than he was at the tour opener, bantering a bit with the crowd and sometimes playfully moving to the front of the stage and casting an enigmatic gaze into their faces. The laughs and smiles among the five musicians reflected the predominantly lighter tone of the new material.

Not that they've relinquished their jurisdiction over the more troublesome side of human nature. Doubts and darkness lurk even in the more serene new songs, and when they fired up the old favorites from albums "OK Computer," "Kid A," et al., they played them with undiminished passion and conviction.

[london]

Genius.

[MacGuffin]

The Eraser
Thom Yorke
Reviewed by Greg Kot; Entertainment Weekly


 
It's widely assumed that singer Thom Yorke calls most of the shots in Radiohead. But the other four guys aren't just window dressing — as Yorke's solo debut, The Eraser, proves.

In between the drawn-out recording sessions for the U.K. quintet's seventh album (due in 2007), Yorke quietly cobbled together the songs for his first solo release with longtime producer Nigel Godrich.

It's not much of a departure. In fact, many of the tunes could pass for Radiohead demos. Some even include sampled slices of discarded songs from the band. The jittery tempos and click-pop loops, the alien atmospherics, the sense of doom — the shadows of Radiohead's electro-tinged past (''The Gloaming,'' ''Idioteque'') lurk everywhere.

The most significant difference is how Godrich recorded Yorke's voice. Gone are the studio effects that tend to alter, distort, or submerge his vocals on Radiohead albums. Instead, his falsetto is remarkably exposed and vulnerable as it meditates on a series of slow-moving melodies. The effect is unsettling: a schoolboy trying to sing away the anxiety as he wanders into a deep, dark virtual forest.

Given much of the album's subject matter, it's an apt strategy. Rock's most prominent worrywart seems positively forlorn as he obliquely addresses everything from global warming to the fallout from the Iraqi war. ''So many lies, so many lies, so many lies,'' he warbles over a minimalist grid of electronic blips and bloops on ''Atoms for Peace.'' On ''The Clock,'' time is not on his side, or the planet's. And ''Harrowdown Hill'' is the sound of ominous footsteps gaining on the hapless: ''You will be dispensed with when you've become inconvenient.''

But the arrangements are equally forbidding, laptop soundscapes with snippets of more traditional instrumentation (guitars, piano), and the overall mood is austere and claustrophobic, even when compared with Radiohead at their most austere and claustrophobic (Kid A, for starters).

Whereas Radiohead pop tension with moments of grandeur, The Eraser cultivates uneasiness with snaky melodies that never make it to a roof-raising chorus. The closest Yorke gets to cutting loose is the distressing chant that splits ''And It Rained All Night'': ''It's relentless, invisible, indefatigable, indisputable, undeniable.'' But even this is more fitting for a feverish night spent shivering under the sheets than an arena-rousing celebration.

One could imagine the dynamics, colors, and crescendos his bandmates might've added, and without them Yorke sounds hemmed in. On its own modest terms, The Eraser provides insight into Radiohead's inner workings. It demonstrates that Yorke needs Radiohead as much as it needs him to transform anxiety into rock arias of enduring beauty and power. Grade: B-

[grand theft sparrow]

OK, The Eraser... it's not the album I expected but it's the one I should have expected.  After first listen, I don't love it but don't hate it.  RK got it right.

I think it's loose, not lazy... like a sleepy amnesiac.

It must be nice to be in a position in which you can record yourself in your spare time and sell 100,000 copies of it.

[tpfkabi]

i was disappointed after first listen. havd thoughts that THE band for me was aging and becoming irrelevant, but the next day i listened through it 3 or so times at work and now i love it.

there's a reason you compare it to Amensiac - i believe i read Yorke pretty much recorded I Might Be Wrong himself at his house doing the guitar and drum machine. it also sounds like Clocks is made up from cutting up bits of Hunting Bears.

[Pubrick]

havd thoughts that THE band for me was aging and becoming irrelevant, but the next day i listened through it 3 or so times at work and now i love it.

you shouldn't be judging the band by thom yorke's solo release, or vice versa.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

nice to be in a position in which you can record yourself in your spare time and sell 100,000 copies of it.

Thom Yorke strips on a webcam?

[Pozer]

only a listen and a half in, but i'm just not enjoying the eraser whatsoever.  first reaction is that it honestly sounds like someone with not too much talent put it together.  like a friend messing around with his/her pro tools.  therere bits & pieces that caught my ear but in the end i felt nothing but annoyance from thom's voice.  ouch.   

[tpfkabi]

havd thoughts that THE band for me was aging and becoming irrelevant, but the next day i listened through it 3 or so times at work and now i love it.

you shouldn't be judging the band by thom yorke's solo release, or vice versa.

this actually started from bits of Amnesiac, HTTT and some of the new songs. actually i don't think it's some much the songs but the way it's produced.