The Fat Angel Sings

The new Radiohead album has been drip-fed. The first two tracks released out of the blue and in sequence, accompanying oddly filmic (and very different) videos. First the Wicker Man of Trumpton and then Paul Thomas Anderson’s abstracted tracking shot of Thom Yorke just looking for a place to lie down and moan backwards.

‘Burn the Witch’ thudded like an eerie herald. It felt like a summoning, a ritual. Suddenly something new was coming, and it sounded very unlike Radiohead. Sure, Thom wasn’t exactly spitting rhymes about diamonds and sunshine all of a sudden, but there was an urgent hopefulness to the strings that slammed in from nowhere, and kept finding ways to build up.

I couldn’t work out how to piece that together with ‘Daydreaming’, which sounds like the band taking another stab at a Bond theme, after ‘Spectre”s surprising success. We were actually trying to work out whether ‘Daydreaming”s video was a horrifying metaphor for alzheimer’s, or just Thom Yorke’s interpretation of an actual Bond film: ‘I’ll just walk through a lot of rooms and smirk a little, right? That’s basically the essence of Bond.’

Because it’s a perfect little Sunday evening laze of a record, really. For all the doom-laden proclamations and the unsettling backmasking, it’s Radiohead letting you take a break.

The pounding rhythm, ominous synth and eventual jerky vocal parts serve up a nervous platter of gorgeous.

“Burn the Witch’ wraps an anxious violin around a throbbing stylophone bassline to brutal effect. As it thickens, it opens up, every upwards, always pulling.

‘Daydreaming’ starts with rattled chimes and ends with a backmasked vocal that sounds like an old robot dog, that can no longer breathe, trying to breathe. The simple piano motif will stay with you forever.

When ‘Decks Dark”s zitherish warbling gives way to its piano groove, it takes a turn into darkness. The piano and bass interplay becomes a thrill, albeit a quiet, laid back one.

‘Desert Island Disk’ is probably one of the simplest Radiohead tracks in the back catalogue. That in itself is striking.

‘Ful Stop’ is not quite motorik, but uses a similar beat to pull you forward. It builds a basic layer of synth wash, and only pulls out the full weight of its instrumentation halfway through. It’s another opening out, almost a bursting. The lyrics become another set of layers, finally keeping pace with the rest of the track. It’s a delicate knot of sound, that revels in its own unfurling in the final seconds.

‘Glass Eyes’ is the one that’d make you cry if it went on a little longer. Through boredom or emotions, depending on your taste.

‘Identikit’ is all jerky drum line and patient waiting, with oddly gospel vocal motifs eventually lifting it out of its own stark mire.

‘The Numbers’ is just a journey. It meanders. It admires the view. It is almost haunted by its own tiny occasional piano motif, that only falls apart in the final moments, surrounded by quietly cut-up laughter.

‘Present Tense’ shuffles around itself, and probably deserves another video of Thom dancing.

‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief’ takes its spy-thriller riffing title seriously, when it pulls slowly from grim loneliness into breathtaking cinematic strings.

And ‘True Love Waits’ finds a way to drown itself, slowly building up its own echo and reverb. Letting itself get more lost, more lonely, more desperate.

The record is lovely, accessible, warm and soothing. It has few rough edges, and many intriguing moments.

‘The Numbers’ is the latest in the long tradition of tracks that rip off the strings from Serge Gainsbourg’s ‘Ballade de Melody Nelson’, but it recontextualises them into such a sweeping breadth that it once again pulls it off.

The album doesn’t feel structured though. I couldn’t see how ‘Burn the Witch’ was supposed to fit with ‘Daydreaming’, and I still don’t. ‘Burn the Witch’ feels like it’s opening a very different record to the one it does. Its urgency is only really matched by ‘Ful Stop’.

For the rest, it feels almost like a beach record. ‘Present Tense’ in particular, with its Spanish guitar and thrumming maracas, feels like Thom and boys having an existential crisis on a tropical beach. The guitars are glistening blue waves, lapping at the toes of Thom’s anxiety. The shuffle dances around him, along with all the added layers as the track moves on.

Really, this is at the core of what I’ve always loved about Radiohead. Detractors will call them a miserable band and it’s fair. Thom sounds bleak and lonely throughout, and sells that tone efficiently, with the usual range of keening wails and cryptic lyrics. But actually, beneath that, has always been an undercurrent of joyfulness. ‘Let Down’ was always the cheeriest possible way to have a nervous breakdown.

And that’s where this album stands. It’s an uplifting break-up record. Torn hearts on sunny days.

Much fuss has already been made about the album closer. A track that’s been heard live since 1995, ‘True Love Waits’ got a sparse live recording around the Amnesiac period, and has apparently been the subject of speculation for a long time. The studio album finally lands, and it’s a lovely thing, piano-wrapped, mechanical sounds exposed, with the earth-shatteringly simple vocal at the core.

To be honest, I preferred the bare simplicity of the live version, just because it sounded like nothing more than Radiohead stripped down to a naked core. Just a sad voice and a guitar, somewow capturing a sort of desperate and unclear optimism, smothered by angst, but still always there.