An uneasy pact: Radiohead host an evening at the O2 Arena

First published in Loud And Quiet

Radiohead 
O2 Arena
9th October 2012

One miserable day in the late 1990s, five successful young men called Radiohead decided to get off the bus, in a manner of speaking. From now on, they said, this stadium-filling rock band wouldn't be playing stadiums. They wouldn't be playing rock, either. So they binned their guitars, sent drummer Phil Selway on an extended tea break and totally recalibrated their musical compass.

It was a savvy and well-timed move; even if that drastic severance with guitar-based anthemic angst rock had produced nothing but the opening track to Kid A, it would've been a major success. The stadiums and guitars crept back in slowly, but their point was made.

In a limbo between life and infinity on The Invisible's 'Rispah'

First published in Loud And Quiet

The Invisible
Rispah
Ninja Tune

The art-pop genre-blenders' second album is an 11-song threnody, an ode of mourning following the death of frontman Dave Okumu’s mother. Named after her, Rispah is bookended by a loose choir of African voices like those Okumu says he heard at the wake, articulating the sorrow and joy entangled in this record, which acknowledges with a heavy heart that even death can bring a renewed passion for life.

As you’d expect from the The Invisible craftsmen, it's lusciously produced – drums flutter and fade as Okumu’s breathily angelic voice drifts into a limbo between life and infinity. The mournful electronics owe much to Radiohead (and the guitar on ‘Surrender’ is straight out of In Rainbows), but the decayed funkiness built up from distorted drums and shivering guitars is uncannily voguish, echoing the exhumed ‘80s R&B we've heard lately on records by Kindness and others.

The King of Limbs remixed: Radiohead as source material for new gen producers

[Wrote this for the Spectator Night & Day arts blog but it hasn't been posted up yet]

Radiohead
TKOL RMX 1234567 
XL Recordings

Given the clangorous fanfare and critical parping that usually accompanies a new Radiohead album, the February release of the band’s eighth studio effort caused merely a few ripples in the big splashy sea of new music. Partly this is down to the band’s decision to forego the expected promotional duties, festival headline slots and arena shows, but another explanation is that The King of Limbs could be band’s least successful and least memorable record. While it’s not without its moments, particularly when it hits its stride halfway through with the twin beauties of ‘Lotus Flower’ and ‘Codex’, TKOL is Radiohead in B-side mode, showing off a practiced ease with their own style and the organic interplay between human and machine; acoustic warmth and synthetic glitch.

But it was also obvious that these few tracks (only eight of them!) would undergo multiple incarnations, as producers and DJs from the top of the tree to its bedroom-bound roots got their hands on the fertile raw material. Given Thom Yorke’s recent collaborations with progressive hip-hop producer Flying Lotus and home-grown talents Four Tet and Burial, it’s not hard to imagine Radiohead taking the remixer’s job into account as they tinker in the studio. Why finish a track definitively when someone else will do it for you? Why write 10 great songs when you could do eight and let the remixers go forth and multiply?

Still playing with the past: The Horrors perform new album 'Skying', 17th June 2011

I'm on the Number 8, heading to Bethnal Green to see the live comeback of a band now defined by their ability to make impressive comebacks. A man standing near me is talking about the gig with his friend, explaining that he doesn't know the band too well but, “I like the whole genre of the Horrors.”

Inwardly I snort as my brain chips in with a facile comeback. “What, 'the past'?”

Haha. But I'm onto something, aren't I?

Just Skyin' around. In the past.

Tonight The Horrors are previewing their third album, Skying, at York Hall in the East End, just down the road from where the band lived while putting together the first album and making waves with their bird's nest hairdos, polka dot waistcoats and hanging-by-a-thread 20-minute live shows. Given that singer Faris has spent most of the past year working on his excellent girl-group-meets-Joe-Meek side project Cat's Eyes, a vehicle that got him a gig inside the Vatican, playing in Bethnal Green must seem like something of a step back. Although perhaps it's a tradition now, given that the preview show for Primary Colours was at Rich Mix, at the other end of Bethnal Green.

And what a horrible venue. At least at Rich Mix, charmless black box though it is, you could actually hear all the instruments. York Hall, a boxing venue turned leisure centre, is a velvet-curtained, polished-wood space in the typical East End fashion; a hall where drums go to die, or in this case to boom out aimlessly while drowning guitar lines and squashing Faris' baritone voice (which has always been a bit of a weak link when he's not squawking, and apparently he doesn't do squawking any more).

Given the drastic step-change in sound, look and atmosphere that accompanied the second album, I suppose I'd expected another reinvention. For a start they look pretty similar, if even more subdued and grungy, with shapeless black sweaters and leather macs hanging limply, while Josh's trademark huge black hair now drips over his face like '90s oil slick. They remain one of the best looking bands around, regardless – a band who you believe are a band, who you couldn't miss if you walked past them waiting for a bus at Liverpool Street or buying milk in Sainsbury's Whitechapel (I can confirm).

So that's what they look like, far away on that raised stage, but what does it sound like? If you've heard the new single 'Still Life' you may have noticed people tentatively throwing the B-word out there. I regret to inform you, they may have a point. The opening bars of the first song 'Changing the Rain' kick in, all booming and chunky. “Fuck,” I say to Sam. “It's not even baggy, it's the fucking Charlatans.”

Wait up!

Let's thrash this out. I've come too far with the Horrors just to abandon them when they have their Be Here Now moment (this was the first reference that sprang to mind when I heard the brass outro to 'Still Life'). We've established that the Horrors' genre is essentially 'The Past'; this is where all their ideas and inspirations come from. I have nothing against this in principle, even if we've been culturally conditioned to demand more! newer! faster! at all times, an attitude that's crying out for political and economic critique, obviously. (I've been meaning to write about this for some time re: the various discussions triggered by Simon Reynolds' latest book, Retromania, but that will have to wait for today.) But, as I mentioned regarding Primary Colours back in 2009, scouring the past for musical ideas is one thing if you select garage rock, let's say, and stick to it. But if you then choose something else – post-punk and kraut, or My Bloody Valentine – then it can seem arbitrary, as if you're shopping for influences. The new material makes me suspicious that this is in fact the case with the Horrors. First they gave us Nuggets of flaming garage primitivism, then it was dazzling man-machine post-punkism, and now apparently they've parked up in the '90s to see what's ripe for the pilfering on the shelves of baggy, shoegaze, grunge and (truly) early Britpop. At this rate their fourth album will sound like LCD Soundsystem and their fifth will be approximately contemporary.

To wit, one of the final new songs they play (which may be titled 'Endless Blue') even sounds like 'My Iron Lung', big and grungy but with an unmistakably wan, British edge. Of course, it may sound nothing like that on the record, but the miserable sound quality contaminates all the new stuff to appear muddy and heavyweight, with none of the pristine amphetamine sharpness of the second album – even 'Sea Within A Sea', easily one of their best and weirdest songs, sounds slightly turgid.

Elsewhere they've kept on plenty of the Kevin Shields guitar flavours but new ingredients include – yes – a bit of Simple Minds, plus a definite '80s 4AD quality in the clever combination of density and dreamy lightness. But again, who knows what subtleties might come through on the album, because you can't actually hear it in here. They play absolutely nothing from the first album, which is no surprise but makes for a pretty static experience visually, with Faris not venturing anywhere near the crowd or embarking on his usual disruptive prowling antics.

I'm still not sure what to make of it. Buoyed by the critical reception to Primary Colours, it would seem the Horrors have moved further towards sleek, smooth, big-venue alt.rock for grown-ups. But if they wanna play with the big boys, they're gonna have to deliver the tunes, and I can't hear a 'Losing My Religion' in this set.

Radiohead, In Rainbows

Radiohead, In Rainbows
Internet only release/XL

Radiohead have now released their seventh studio album. The entire promotional tour for its release consisted of a three line blog post from Johnny Greenwood. The record, In Rainbows, was released as a download only on 10^th October (with a boxset to come later in the year), for which there was no fixed price. “It’s up to you”, they said – pay what you want. They are so far refusing to release details of its sales figures to the official chart compilers, thus making it ineligible for the number one position that it no doubt has achieved a hundred times over already.

The fact that Radiohead have chosen to ignore all accepted conventions of releasing a record, cutting out everything from the distribution to the deal itself, may well have a lasting impact on how we buy and sell music from this moment on. But that’s something for the record company moneypinchers and PR layabouts to worry over. Frankly, the public don’t give a toss about any of that. Why? Because it’s the new Radiohead album! Just play it!

Four years after Hail To The Thief, an album named in honour of President Dubya, and the world seems much the same. We’re still bogged down in Iraq, that President is still the President, and the planet continues to hurtle towards the button marked self-destruct with barely a peep from the people who could stop it. But where Hail To The Thief was an angry polemic railing against heavy-handed authority and corrupt politics, In Rainbows is – well, it’s called In Rainbows for a start. Without artwork you’re left with just those two words as a guide to the meaning of this record, two words that turn out to be more than enough once you’re plunged into an album that is genuinely bursting with colour, leading your mind into endless sublime dreamscapes, as all Radiohead albums do.

The unmistakeable highlight on first listen is ‘Nude’, a song that’s been knocking around for ages and now finally done full justice in this mind-bogglingly beautiful track which picks up where Kid A’s ‘How To Disappear Completely’ left off, using its familiar layered, reversed and looped parts. This is the kind of subtle magnificence that other two-bit indie bands dream about; it wrenches your insides and forces you to close your eyes for Thom’s perfect vocal take and guitars so warm they melt and disintegrate into a cosy blanket of fuzz. Its twin pillar is ‘Bodysnatchers’, the obvious ‘first single’ if that had been a possibility with In Rainbows. Like ‘Electioneering’ in a post-victory honeymoon, it races along with an almost dancefloor-ready urgency as zillions of fantastic crunchy noises and springy guitars pop in your ears. This is why earphones are required equipment for any self-respecting Radio-head.

What really sets this apart from their other albums becomes apparent on tracks like ‘Weird Fishes/Arpeggi’ - where before the band would have used drum machines and unrecognisably altered guitar samples, they’ve eschewed sparse, cold beats for real guitars with incredibly rich, warm tones and expansive orchestral sections. Johnny Greenwood’s recent dabble in classical music is obvious, particularly on ‘All I Need’ which climaxes in a dramatic orchestral pile-up that’s so loud and so uplifting that even its morbid lyric, “I’m an animal trapped in your hot car,” can’t taint its optimism.

There could never be enough space to describe every genius touch on this faultless record, but that can only be a good thing. Radiohead make albums to keep, albums to come back to and albums to befriend. Acquaint yourself with In Rainbows personally, and find your own version inside. A perfect album from a truly peerless band.