Radiohead’s “A Moon Shaped Pool.”
has just cut its most wounded album to date.
And that’s coming from a band that once sang “I’ll take a quiet life / A handshake of carbon monoxide / No alarms and no surprises.”
The thing about “A Moon Shaped Pool,” the ninth album from the increasingly proggy five-piece from Oxfordshire, England, is that unlike the sunny strings of there isn’t so much as a polite smile here to distract from the band’s crumbling state of mind. The manic of is a rope cut, and the rest of the album is spent in freefall.
For as much attention as Yorke’s voice, solipsistic worldview (from “Glass Eyes”: “Hey it’s me / I just got off the train / a frightening place / the faces are concrete grey”) and receive, “A Moon Shaped Pool” showcases two of the band’s background players. Thanks to producer Nigel Godrich, the album has the uneasy tension of a bowling ball on a high wire. To his credit, Godrich only formally takes the forefront when it suits the song, like on “Glass Eyes”‘ queasy intro. Multi-instrumentalist Johnny Greenwood wheels in the orchestra pit he scooped up writing immense scores for equally massive, ellipsis-ridden Paul Thomas Anderson films like and which shakes out in deviously intricate arrangements (“The Numbers”) and spools of cinematic grandeur (“Decks Dark”).
The album doesn’t end with a bang, but a whimper. “True Love Waits” is a long-awaited relic from the band’s late nineties creative salad days, heard here for the first time on a studio album. Whereas the record’s other spare arrangement, “Desert Island Disk,” feels incomplete, Yorke and Godrich’s feather-light touch clicks flush into place for the coda. It’s a crushing piece of pathos from Yorke, especially in light of his split with his girlfriend of more than 20 years.
Calling this just a break-up album is reductive, but considering the timing and the fact it’s the first full-length Radiohead release where York hasn’t been in this relationship, it isn’t wrong. (If anything, considering how much time they were together, it’s understandable.) For a band that’s spent much of its later years flailing against looming , nothing smarts like personal loss. “A Moon Shaped Pool” leans into that pain, and in true Radiohead fashion, reminds you how uncomfortably familiar it is.
