Radiohead [updated again]

After making my way through about 20 of the lower-tier artists, its time to break off one of these big guys that is going to take me a while.  We'll dive in with the biggest fish of the whole 'fest, Radiohead.  A jillion words have already been written about them, as they are one of the biggest rock bands on the planet, but I'll give it a go anyway because this is what I do.

I'll start this out by saying right here and now that I am extremely excited to have them coming to ACL.  I can't wait to see them play.  I'm a little nervous about the setlist and their need to veer far away from what is expected from fair weather fans like me, but I'm hopeful. They came to the Erwin Center a few years ago and I was kind of mad at myself for not ponying up to go see what they do in a live setting. From what I've heard, they are amazing to see live.  And this is a band that should be the top headliner of the big festival - they are the kind of group that could sell out an arena in 30 seconds and tour the entire world with name recognition and fan bases.  This is a great get.

So, what is my problem?  They changed their style of music, and I think their older stuff is significantly better.  I think the old stuff is more focused.  I didn't buy in to their music until about the time of Kid A, which lead me back to their first three albums. And to me, that is where the heart of the band lies, Pablo Honey, The Bends, and OK Computer, not in this new experimental stuff that is almost intentionally difficult to listen to.  So my hope is that they copy old concerts and play the good stuff and only infrequently wander out into the woods of "Like Spinning Plates."

Luckily for me (and you), Thom Yorke's public animus towards Spotify hasn't carried over to removing all of the Radiohead tunes from the platform.  So, other than the new album and In Rainbows, you can stream all of their tunes right now. [updated: In Rainbows is now available as of 6/10/16, and A Moon Shaped Pool is now available as of 6/17/16. Sweet!]

Like I did with the Foos last year, I'll go through the entire catalog in order of my preference. Down below we'll get into the guessing of the setlist:

1.  The Bends.  1995.  This was their second album, and I think it took the slightly trippy, paranoid sound of the first album and stretched it out into a better rock album.  You'll still hear some echos of grunge in this music, as it isn't too terribly far behind the Nirvana-based revolution in rock, but it has its own spin on that sound.  The album spun off several hit singles, hit platinum status in the U.S. (and 4x platinum under the BPI), but only made it to #88 on the U.S. charts.  This is the real rock and roll phase of the band - no electronics, no brit pop sounds, just real deal rock and roll.  My favorite track is the fantastic "Fake Plastic Trees."

This one cracks the top five of popularity on Spotify, so I'm not alone with 24.8 million people also streaming this one.  The sadness in that "it wears you out" bit, hell, the sadness and dejection in the whole thing, it just so good.  "Used to do surgery, for girls in the 80's, but gravity always wins."  I've always loved that line, imagining girls from a Shasta commercial getting a lift from a Michael J. Fox doctor but then getting saggy over time.  This album also created hits in "The Bends" and "High and Dry," both of which are great.  BTW, how funny does Thom Yorke look in that video, all extremely soccer hooligan dyed and scrawny.  "Just" is a rockin' jam out, and "Street Spirit (Fade Out)" is also a beaut.  I pretty well like this whole album from start to finish.

2.  OK Computer.  1997.  By far their most acclaimed album.  #3 on Rolling Stone's 100 Best Albums of the 90's, #20 of NME's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, #2 in Q Magazine's 100 Greatest British Albums Ever, #111 or Rock & Roll Hall of Fame's Top 200 Albums, #1 in Pitchfork's top 100 albums of the 90's.  And many more that aren't worth all listing here. Also won the 1998 Best Alternative Musical Performance Grammy.  And while I generally agree, it has some great songs and is wonderful, it ain't the number one album of all time.  It also is the gateway album for the weird sonic electronic stuff that leaked out after this album.
A few years after this album came out, I discovered and loved Travis.  They absolutely ripoff the sound of "Paranoid Android" and "No Surprises."  It doesn't even bother me that they were copiers, I still remember loving them so very much.
Of course, "Karma Police" was the big hit here, and it remains the second most listened-to track on Spotify for the band, at 51.6 million.

This one remains on rock and alternative radio to this day for good reason.  Really cool and original sound.  "Paranoid Android," with its rock freakout, is also awesome, as is "Subterranean Homesick Alien."  But the best other song on here is "No Surprises," which is depressing as all living hell, and also happens to have a great video.

34 million views for that video, and although I've seen it several times I still just watched the whole thing to see it happen all over again.  That left eye is so weird.  A taste of the lyrics, in case you don't know them or can't read them:

"A heart that's full up like a landfill
A job that slowly kills you
Bruises that won't heal
You look so tired, unhappy
Bring down the government
They don't, they don't speak for us
I'll take a quiet life
A handshake of carbon monoxide
With no alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises
Silent, silent"

Man.  "A job that slowly kills you" and "handshake of carbon monoxide" are just brutal, especially in that gentle delivery.  Hell of a song, and part of the reason why I think this album is so solid.

3.  Pablo Honey.  1993.  The first album, the opening shot.  In my mind I liked it better than I remembered, but on re-listening, it barely beat out some of the weird electro stuff.  It is much more in tune with the Brit Pop movement of the early nineties, not so far as Blur ("There's No Other Way") or Oasis ("Supersonic") because its just all a little bit darker than those, but it still has a great sound and some danceable jams.  One of my favorites of those is "Anyone Can Play Guitar," but if I'm talking about this album, you have to listen to the monster hit, the one track of Radiohead's that fires up more than 100 million listens on Spotify.  "Creep."

Iconic guitar parts, great lyrics, gets continued radioplay for a good reason.  Fun aside, someone on Facebook the other day posed the question of the best pair of songs by two different artists that share the same name.  His entry was Creep by Radiohead and Stone Temple Pilots.  After some thought, my initial entry was "Crazy" by Patsy Cline and Gnarls Barkley, but then I came up with the easy winner, "One" by Metallica and U2.  I win. Anyway, I think this album is best when it rocks out in songs like "Ripcord."

4. Hail to the Thief.  2003.  I have a special place in my memory for this album, as I bought it on CD just before I moved down to Corpus Christi for half of a summer of living with a friend and his wife and a summer clerkship.  Either this disc or an old Pete Yorn disc are the mental touchstone soundtrack of that summer.  Although the first thing it always brings to mind is my friend and I mocking the portion of "Sit Down, Stand Up" when the electro freakout kicks in and Yorke starts muttering "the raindrops" over and over and over and over.  The good tracks on here leave the electro garbage in the background, like "Go to Sleep," which goes back and finds some acoustic guitars gathering dust in the back of the Radiohead studio space and grooves them out.  But the "hit" off of this album (I use quotes because it didn't even chart in the U.S.) is "There, There," which has about 8.2 million listens on Spotify.

That video is some freaky deaky, yo.  And what a surprise that the two most popular tracks on their album are the more traditional rock songs that don't do devolve into bleeps and blorps.  I've always kind of enjoyed "A Punch Up at a Wedding" near the end of this disc as well, and the groove on "Myxomatosis" is super tight as well.  Interestingly, the band is quoted on Wikipedia as saying they now wish they would have deleted a few songs from the album to keep it more coherent.  Agreed.
Fun fact: The album was apparently named after the phrase used by protesters against George W. Bush after the 2000 election mess, with the Yorke saying the album title was partly chosen to "state the bleeding obvious ... that the most powerful country on earth is run by somebody who stole an election."  Interesting to me that he would care that much about Bush v. Gore.

5.  Kid A.  2000.  Electronic-fest.  Although, I've always really liked "Everything in its Right Place," I think mainly because of the excellent Vanilla Sky soundtrack and my memory of that song in that movie (also why I first loved Jeff Buckley's "Last Goodbye"). Thought it worked really well.  And I like the way it builds up and then releases in a very pleasing way. There is a lot of dissonance on this album, which makes it really challenging unless you are a fancy rock critic who comes to climax in those moments.

The moment I recall best about this album was, not long after it came out, I was married and moved in with my wife.  I've got to admit that a shared love for similar music has never been the thing that drew us together, she could honestly care less about what she is listening to half the time, and I apparently obsess a bit about music.  So I bring this disc home to our apartment and throw it into my stereo to jam as we are puttering around the house, fully expecting that she would appreciate my trendy choice of the new number one album from the cool kids who brought us "Creep" and "Karma Police."  Nope.  Hell nope.  I was kind of feeling the groove of "The National Anthem" when she finally looked over at me for a conversation approximating the following:

• "what the hell is this garbage, Jack?  Do you actually like this?"
• "Errrr, uh, yeah, this is the new Radiohead, babe.  They're awesome, right?"
• "no, this sounds like shit.  I think a cat just got killed."
• "oh, well, yeah, you know, this is like 'Day in the Life' style stuff, babe, you have to get a little off the rails so that getting back in tune feels good.  These guys made 'Karma Police.'"
• "<2 minute long sigh> I should have married that guy from high school who loved Garth Brooks."
• <Jack takes disc out of CD player and hides in car>

In typically weird Radiohead fashion, they released no singles for the album.  "Radiohead refused to release singles or music videos to promote Kid A; instead, 30-second animated "blips" were set to its music based on the artwork Stanley Donwood and Yorke designed for the album's packaging."  mmmmmkay. Lets see 'em:

Well, alrighty then.  Way better than just making a video and playing your music. "Everything in its Right Place" is the leader in streams at 16.2 million, with "Idioteque" right behind it at 10.2.  Here is "Everything," via a live clip.

Of particular note for this album, Wikipedia says "Yorke wrote many of Kid A's lyrics by cutting up words and phrases and assembling them at random."  Which sounds about right. And it makes it seem even weirder that the critics absolutely loved this album.  If a band can write entirely random lyrics that mean nothing and entirely change their musical sound, you'd think that this album would have tanked, but critics are weird.  In a consistent theme with the other music discussed here, my other favorite song is the one that sounds like guitar-based rock instead of a bad Bjork b-side, "Optimistic."

6.  In Rainbows.  2007.  This was the big "pay as you wish" experiment after they exited their record label, where they posted the album on their website (I still get random e-mails from WASTE) and allowed you to pay whatever you wanted to download the album.  I can't recall what I paid, but I'd be surprised if it was very much.  At the time, people were very excited about the implications for the record industry, how this was the death knell for the traditional label structure and Radiohead had blown up everything.  Or not, and we still get most of our music through the labels.
This album won two Grammys in 2009, one for Best Alternative Music Album, and is #336 on Rolling Stone's best 500 albums of all time.  Sadly, you can't listen to it on Spotify [updated, now you can, as of 6/10/16], I guess because it was available without a label who could license it.  Which is annoying. But it is a pretty good album anyway, with some electro action but a lot of good rock and groove. That is the best part of the "new" Radiohead to me, when the bassist Colin Greenwood just locks into a tight groove and you can jam along. Like "15 Step" from this album, great bass line.  Here is one way to listen to some of the songs from this album, a cool basement concert thing:

The first four songs are all from In Rainbows, then seventh, tenth, and eleventh are also from the album.  "Bodysnatchers" is a good one, but I could do without the meandering "Nude."

[updated] Now that this is available on Spotify, and I don't have to go through the huge hassle of figuring out which hard drive at home has this album on it.  My guess is that most of you out there are like me and try to avoid using iTunes EVER if at all possible because it is the slowest program of all time.  I've got a buttload of songs in it, and so when I open the program it takes minutes to even figure out if it is going to work for the day.  ANYWAY, I am relistening to the album now and it is even better than I remembered.  "All I Need" and "Reckoner" are pretty cool.  It might have jumped up to #4 if I had taken the time to relisten to the whole thing instead of just listening to that basement tape thing up above.

The dorky statistics part of me is enjoying the fact that, as I listen to this album, there are less than 1,000 streams on all of the songs on this album as of right now.  The rest of the world will wake up to the fact they can stream it today, but for now it feels fun to be a pioneer in this streaming pool.

7.  The King of Limbs.  2011.  You know what?  Listen to this album again.  In my mind, I recalled it as truly terrible, something where they were actively trying to turn me off.  But really, its just kind of a boring album.  It is very pretty, all falsettos and layered sounds, but you literally wouldn't remember a single thing that came from it, twenty minutes after you finished listening to it.  The most popular track on the album, likely more for the freaky ass video than the song, is "Lotus Flower," which has 14.7 million streams on Spotify, but 37.1 million views on YouTube.

Super seizure dance fest.  But this song describes my thought about this album.  Its not bad, it even has a kind of cool groove in that bass line that runs through the whole song, but that doesn't save it from being forgettable.  Only sincere Radiohead nerds are going to recall and talk about this album, with no real singles or approachable tunes.

8.  Amnesiac.  2001.  OK, this is where stuff truly went off the rails.  I still don't hate this album, but I really don't see how listening to "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" makes any sense at all.  Just annoying.  This feels more like going to a poetry reading in a bar where a nearby broken jukebox is playing snippets of songs and croaking out weird sounds that are distracting you from listening to the poem.  Somehow, "Pyramid Song" was the first single from the album, and its strings/synths/laptop depression vibe apparently did so well that it did not chart in America at all.  However, it is, of course, the top song off of the album as far as Spotify streams go, with 8.9 million listens.  But I want to pimp the vastly better track from the album, "I Might Be Wrong," which sounds like rock and roll again.

If you just take the songs I've linked to on this blog post and make an album out of those, you get a pretty good and coherent picture of a rock band that dabbles some in electronics, instead of one bloated and full of tracks that could be forgotten and left in the digital graveyard.  Because "I Might Be Wrong" and "Knives Out" are literally the only songs that I want to hear from this album.

9.  A Moon Shaped Pool.  2016.  Ranked here simply because I couldn't hear the damn thing without paying for it or opening my computer up to scary Armenian hacker hub listening stations, until just recently when it became available on Spotify.  Well, that isn't entirely true, I did listen to a live-streaming BBC radio podcast-y kind of thing to hear it once, and it was kind of amazing the level of breathless hyperbole heaped on the album in between each song.  The host of the radio program read people's tweets as they listened to the album with him, and the praise could not have been piled any higher.  "Greatest band of all time!  The hits keep coming!  Crown them king for the most amazing songs ever!  I just cured cancer because you played Identikit!  Their lyrics are untouchable in all of human history!"

After a few listens of the entire album, they seem to trade in a lot of the electronic noise in favor of strings and piano, this one has an orchestral sound that has been hinted at before, but this one goes all in on it.  The top single from the new album is "Burn the Witch," which has 7.5 million streams so far (9.8 two weeks later).

That video is some weird Bob the Builder gone to creepy-ville stuff.  But I like the song well enough, nothing mind-boggling or even all that catchy so that I sing it to myself later, but pretty good.  The other two you could stream before the whole album were "Daydreaming" and "Spectre," and I like "Burn the Witch" the best out of those three.  I think my main issue with this album is that it feels like I've heard these songs before.  "Ful Stop" could easily have been a b-side from another recent album.  I guess the album is fine, just nothing that I'll likely remember or want to go back to later.

Setlist:
So then, out of all of that, what are we likely to hear played in October?  One good indicator - what kind of show did they play at ACL in 2012?

Yes, that is the full hour episode (with really low sound), and shows that despite it being a taping for ACL, they still do what they want and play their weird new stuff instead of the hits. Playlist was Bloom, Daily Mail, Myxomatosis, Morning Mr. Magpie, The Amazing Sounds of Orgy, Staircase, Identikit, There There, Feral, Idioteque, and Paranoid Android.  Three tracks from King of Limbs (the new album at this taping), two from Hail to the Thief, one from Kid A, one from OK Computer.  Three of those were unreleased.  Hell, "Identikit" is on Moon Shaped Pool, so they time-traveled to play that track in 2012.  But none of the hits other than "Paranoid Android."

I was talking to someone the other day who said that their European setlists are going to be very different from their American ones, so I'll need to look at their setlists once they have played through the summer, but analyzing their first four concerts of this tour (all in Europe), there are definite patterns:

1. The first five songs, all four nights, have been songs from the new Moon Shaped Pool album, in the same order (Burn the Witch, Daydreaming, Decks Dark, Desert Island Disk, and Ful Stop).
2. All four shows have had exactly 24 songs.
3. In each, the eleventh song has been "Identikit" from the new album, followed by "The Numbers" from the new album.  In between and after those tracks, the setlist is very mixed, but "Present Tense" from the new album also makes each night.  "Glass Eyes" is the only song from the new disc to not be played on any of the four nights.
4. "Creep" only happened one night out of four, same with "No Surprises," while "Karma Police" only got played two of the four nights.  "Fake Plastic Trees" isn't played AT ALL, which is some BS.  "High and Dry" is likewise missing.
5. Certain songs (other than those mentioned above from the new album) make every show: "Bloom," "Bodysnatchers," "Everything in its Right Place," "Idioteque," and "Lotus Flower." 

So, 14 songs repeat every night, and almost every song from the new album will make an appearance. Many of the hits aren't played on any given night, if at all.  My hope, and if we take a look at other festivals they are going to play this summer we should learn more, is that they'll make this show less about the new album and more about the greatest hits, but we shall see.  I'll update this once they have played a festival or two this summer.

[UPDATE]
As discussed up above, I thought I'd check out the playlist once they came to America and did a fest or two, to see what kind of tunes we could expect in Zilker Park.  Here is their Lolla playlist, with some comments:

• Burn the Witch.
• Opening track from A Moon Shaped Pool, most popular track from that album by far with over 18 million streams.  
• Daydreaming.
• Second track on AMSP, but falls off to 8.3 million streams.
• Ful Stop.
• Fifth track on AMSP, only 2.7 million streams.  Kind of an annoying track.
• 2 + 2 = 5.
• Opener for Hail to the Thief, kinda rad.
• Myxomatosis
• 12th track on Hail to the Thief, also a great rocker made of electronic limbs.
• My Iron Lung
• A track from The Bends!  Victory for me!  Too bad its not Fake Plastic Trees though...  This is back when they had guitars featured prominently, so maybe they will have a half hour stage set change here to get those out of mothballs.
• Climbing Up the Walls.
• OK Computer.  I feel like we are going to spend the entirety of this concert jamming out to their rocking songs, and then taking cat naps when they go slow.
• No Surprises
• Another OK Computer song!  Hooray!  And this song is beautiful, I hope they do it at ACL.
• Pyramid Song.
• The only Amnesiac track in the set.  As noted above, by far the most popular on this misfit album.  Slow and sad.  Not a track I'd expect them to play at a huge festival concert, but then again, these guys don't care what I think.
• Bloom.
• The lone track from The King of Limbs.  Freaking weird, and no clue why it would make sense for this to be in their set.  The very limited lyrics, sung as though Thom Yorke's mouth was just deadened for a root canal, include the powerful closing couplet of "A giant turtle's eyes, Jellyfish swim by."
• Identikit.
• Another AMSP track, although as noted above this one has been around before.
• The Numbers.
• AMSP
• The Gloaming.
• Hail to the Thief. Tangled sounding electro, another odd choice for a festival set.
• Weird Fishes/Arpeggi.
• In Rainbows.
• Everything in Its Right Place.
• From Kid A, this song is great.
• Idioteque.
• Also from Kid A, this must be the Kid A portion of their show.
• There There.
• Hail to the Thief.

Encore:

• Let Down.
• A third OK Computer track!  This is INSANE!
• Present Tense.
• AMSP
• Paranoid Android.
• A fourth OK Computer song!  Woohoo!  Although, I've become jaded over this song because any hack journalist who is ever writing anything about robots uses the title of the track at least three times in their title and or article.  I just saw a Rolling Stone blurb about the new show Westworld that used it both in the title and in the body of the article, and it makes me cringe.  But the track itself is still bad ass.
• Nude.
• From In Rainbows.  I always forget how good the In Rainbows songs are, although this one is very slow, kinda groovy and quiet.  Another kind of strange pick for the encore.
• Bodysnatchers.
• From In Rainbows.  Good track.

Encore 2:

• Street Spirit (Fade Out)
• The Bends.  This is a great song too.
• Karma Police
• a fifth OK Computer song, and the biggest hit of the show, for the grand finale.  Seems like this moment will be cool, to sing along to this track with the entirety of the festival.

Albums Scorecard: AMSP: 6, OK Computer: 5, Hail to the Thief: 4, In Rainbows: 3, The Bends: 2, Kid A: 2, Amnesiac: 1, King of Limbs: 1.  Makes sense, the new album gets considerable love and then their most popular album gets second most.

24 total tracks.  Karma Police, No Surprises, Burn the Witch, Daydreaming - those are the four tracks on this list that are also currently in the top ten most popular tracks on Spotify.  Bummer that "Creep," "Fake Plastic Trees," and "High and Dry" don't make this set list, but at least they lean heavily on OK Computer.

I also went and ran through their Outside Lands Festival playlist, as that is their other big American festival stop, and it is very similar.  The first four tracks are exactly the same, then they switch the order of things for a few songs, but then when they get to "Pyramid Song," they go on an identical run through the next seven songs.  Only one encore, and it is just like the first encore at Lolla, except that "Karma Police" steps in for Bodysnatchers, which happened earlier in the set.  Outside Lands didn't get "Street Spirit (Fade Out)," "Myxomatosis," "No Surprises," or "My Iron Lung," so they missed out on both tracks from The Bends, which hurts me.

Here's to hoping they generally stick to this list but add in some more from the Bends!