The Album Review Club - Christmas Break Until 8th January

Black&White&BlueMoon Town said:
You are correct, and you're welcome for today's softball right over the plate. That was actually the Manchester Orchestra in the musical group photo.

Both you and @threespires know from our Playlist thread quite well on my enjoyment for this band and this selection.

A Black Mile To The Surface – Manchester Orchestra
(part 2 of my “Manchester” related selections)

Released in 2017, this album was the first by Atlanta group Manchester Orchestra that really drew me in to them and their sound. It was their 5th album, but with this release they reached well beyond their existing emo and alternative rock fanbase into the indie and Americana influences, to amazing success. In many aspects, this album was a reset to what the band had recorded prior. I’ve enjoyed all of their albums since going back to their beginnings, but this is the one I come back to as being my favourite.

Created and led by lead singer and guitarist Andy Hull, he chose the group name location due to the rich music history that has come from the City of Manchester after a summer of listening to “nothing but The Smiths”. Andy chose "Orchestra" as part of the name because he "didn't want to be in a band" and envisioned having “his friends come and be a part forming an orchestra".

The group certainly lives up to the sound with this album, and what originally attracted me to it on the whole were the lyrical themes that run throughout it. They changed their normally crunchy guitars that ran through most tracks and focused more on the story here, with the help of producer Catherine Marks (Foals, PJ Harvey, The Killers, Interpol) and recorded most of the tracks at Asheville’s Echo Mountain studio in my home state of NC.

The album has singles some may have heard on their own, but each song contributes towards the overall themes that really resonated with me. To me, they are:
  • The <Tracks> – each song (except one) is titled “The ____” and deals with a specific item, but still adds to the various thematic components throughout.
  • Fatherhood
  • Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in – tracks 2, 3, and 4 (title location of where this is) and the isolation of such that is the album title found in track 2 lyrics
  • Narrative theme of childhood abuse – middle tracks
  • Faith and Love and the Circle of Life
The central motif found in variations in songs of the album that there's nothing you've got when you die that you keep, is centered on Andy’s statement that “when this life ends, all you can do is hopefully affect and influence what happens after you.”

I’ve seen Manchester Orchestra up close three times live in very small venues, and they’ve delivered each and every time. I would highly recommend if you are able to catch them live (Castle Combe, UK at 2000trees on 11 July this summer). I’ve seen Andy perform solo and part of his Bad Books side-project too, and the stripped-down versions of a few of the songs with just an acoustic guitar was amazing as well. Enjoy!

Manchester Orchestra recorded this YouTube concert video of the entire album during Covid back at Echo Mountain Studios in Asheville. Manchester Orchestra Presents: A Black Mile To The Surface (The Concert Film) is a tremendous live recording that captures the essence of the album too. Primarily for fans of, check it out:

Click to expand...


Sorry to rebump, thought this might be of interest….Manchester Orchestra are releasing a cover a month….Desperado soon

 
Deeeeeeeeeeeep breaths . . . here we go:

  1. Nothing I learned re-listening has changed my view that this is – hands down – the most overrated record in pop music history.
  2. I’ve also said over and over that I don’t hate everything this band has done. And I derived some pleasure from this, more than I recall deriving before.
  3. I do inherently hate the tempos. Slow BPMs aren’t me. I’ve talked a lot about “sit and listen” records vs. “get up and move” records and this is one of THE poster children for the former outside of “Dark Side Of The Moon” (a record I very much like) and which I and others think this record tries to resemble (fairly unsuccessfully).
  4. I dislike the lack of balance, optimism, humo(u)r and tone in this record. I am not one for mopery. I'm too busy. I have too many things in my life I either enjoy, or tasks to complete which I will enjoy when done. Wallowing has never been me.
  5. The comments on production leave me conflicted. It is well-produced. But as I wrote about The Waterboys record, production is sometimes a way to cover up thin melody, and that is absolutely the case here, regularly. It’s not going to fool me. I know a hook when I hear one. There aren’t many (though there ARE more than I remember), and feedback, overdubs and the periodic use of a glockenspiel or some such other instrument isn’t going to trick me into thinking the sonics are a substitute.
  6. I can’t divorce what I know about the artist from the record. It’s meta – I get it. My comments about Thom Yorke wanting to be a rock star, not a musician, apply equally to Bono and U2 IMO, and for me it’s a major strike against them as artists. RH’s sound was 50,000-person arena suited from the beginning. They were offered a record contract early. Imagine them trying to grind their way through the bar band/club circuit. That’s where frustration and humility are born and worked through, where nearly all (not all but nearly all) great bands were once forged before the age of direct-to-audience-via-YouTube. These guys didn’t pay those kind of dues. Even the greatest arena rock band I’ve ever seen – Van Halen – did. How am I supposed to believe Thom’s tales of alienation knowing this? Worse, after he got famous, he moaned incessantly about how tough his life as a rock star is. The brothers Gallagher are often wrong about things, sometimes spectacularly, but when Noel said, “They’re stuck in the back of limousines telling you how bored they are being in a group. If you don’t enjoy it, retire. Do us all a favour. Or move to a mansion in Oxford so we don’t have to listen to you bleeding on about how shit your life is”, he’s right. You can’t get away from this when trying to contextualiz(s)e the misery Yorke sings about. If you can, you’re in denial. If he was singing about his own specific miseries without the ellipses, then okay. But he isn’t – which is why I think this becomes largely inauthentic. Even if I knew nothing about him – and I didn’t when I first heard this – I’d say (and did say) “What in the actual fuck is this guy talking about? WHO is he talking about? This is misery for misery’s sake.”
  7. I’ve already addressed this but I’ll repeat it: This is overrated because it’s NOT about a dsytopian now or future. It's about that only in RETROSPECT. Ask the band: "Radiohead have said they do not consider OK Computer a concept album and did not intend to link the songs through a narrative or unifying concept while it was being written." This creates a problem for some of those who love it because the intent they ascribe is and was not there - a classic consumer vs. creator issue in art generally. When I bring this up I get the take of “you just don’t understand” or “you need to listen to it more” or “you had to be there”. This is the crux of why I think it's overrated. @threespires noted this too.
  8. Now to the tunes. The most moving, and best, song on the record is “Fitter Happier.” It’s the one realized vision, the one universal. All of us have been force-fed a goal set and rules to live by that seem crushing and overwhelming, and by computerizing the vocals, the prescriptive directives take on a different, chilling, hopeless air. And because they are specific (and direct, unlike so much of the rest of the record), they have power. And because they aren’t “emoted” by Thom, they are authentic. And by the way – he wrote the lyrics in ten minutes. There’s a lesson there.
  9. I will say that I actually came away liking “Airbag” quite a bit more than I remembered. The echoey carry still irritates me, but the backbeat and chord changes hit me harder than I recall. I wish the band had carried that Soundgarden-y tempo along into other songs.
  10. The tune the band thought sounded least like Radiohead isn't THE best but it's the one I LIKE best – the closer “The Tourist.” Here the rather lovely chorus provides the melodic hook. It’s pointless, like nearly all the rest of these songs, but at least vaguely pretty.
  11. The most actual “song-form” song is “Karma Police”, which whilst I don’t love it, is good enough - better conceptually and aurally than their pre-OKC hits “High And Dry” and “Creep”, which I find pretty unbearable. Whilst I am unclear on what the Karma Police would be arresting anyone for (as usual, Thom’s idea trails off into nothingness), the idea that a Karma Police exists is pleasant to contemplate.
  12. “Subterranean Homesick Alien” is the greatest U2 imitation ever crafted. As such, it’s both eminently listenable and vomit-inducing in equal degrees.
  13. “Paranoid Android” - save the power-chord guitar-bridge - is infuriating. I’ll never get it. Of all the songs I've heard in my life, very few more than this tune do I have such a love/hate relationship with. I love parts of it. Then I hate it. Then I like it for 17.5 seconds. Then hate it for 31.9 seconds. Arrrrrrrgggggghhhhhh, make up your mind, you bastards.
  14. There are two awful, awful, AWFUL songs on this record. I absolutely cannot stand “Climbing The Walls” and “Exit Music (For A Film)”. The first is a horror film – I am actually physically revolted by the lyrics, and the tune is the usual slow march into tuneless blackness – and the second is so abstract I was actually floored when I read it was inspired by an image of Clare Danes with a gun to her head in “Romeo + Juliet”. In fact, I can find so little trace of all the influences Yorke et al said they had on this record (Miles Davis in particular), it’s almost as if he made all that shit up after the fact to give the record more heft. It drives me batty.
  15. Though I have spilled a lot of blood-words decrying the rampant cynicism I felt coursed through this record, now that I'm calmer, I’ve since softened my view and attribute at least some of what I thought was cynicism to Thom Yorke’s fundamental inability to write very well. He described these songs as “Polaroids” he took while passing through life. He is a misery voyeur, which annoys me, but there’s something else. In my mind, great art takes small things and spins them into big themes. This is precisely the opposite of that – an attempt to cram every negative observed into the world and force them into a 53-minute box. He also offers no hope for escape. No doubt as an inveterate optimist, which I am, neither the effort nor the outcome are going to resonate with me. But then I find this quote on Wikipedia: "Yorke said he did not want to do 'another miserable, morbid and negative record' " after "The Bends". Once again, this man's lack of self-awareness is so low it can barely be charted, low even for a rock star.
  16. One theory I’ll float is that pasty-faced young adults who didn’t cotton to Nirvana’s sonics but needed an anthem to underscore their biological age-based malaise were ripe for oppositional music like this – slow, doleful, dark (albeit with bursts of guitar like on “Airbag”, “PA” or “Electioneering”). What irony that both Kurt and Thom claimed influence by The Pixies. Even more ironic that so many of you didn’t like “Doolittle”.
  17. The earlier point that there wasn’t a lot of good music released in 1997 and therefore this punches above its weight is interesting. I don’t think naught-else released in 1997 was good (and I know that wasn’t implied), and I will offer up my favo(u)rite 1997 record in future. But was 1997 thin compared to lots of other periods (1980-83, 1991-94)? Absolutely IMO.
  18. Here’s my blind spot, and it took some study and comments by some of you to get me to see this: I don’t have the appreciation Brits do for how this stomped on Britpop at the time, similar to how Nirvana stomped on hair metal. That’s because whilst Oasis, Blur, etc. were a thing over here, they weren’t THE thing they were over there. Whatever I think, Radiohead clearly tapped into something that struck a whale of a transformational chord musically, and I think this was part of the rapturous reception, and a part I didn’t appreciate. Whether accidental or intentional, cynical or heartfelt, none of us can deny its influence. And that is special.
  19. So if we put ALL of this in a blender, how do I score it? I’m not going to take the @threespires approach. I like it less musically than he does. But there are moments I’ve come to enjoy, and even feel. I’m not going to penali(z)e it for being so clinically overrated – that’s on all of you.
  20. I think for such a record, a special score is needed: Pi/10.​
 
Last edited:
FogBlueInSanFran said:
Deeeeeeeeeeeep breaths . . . here we go:

  1. Nothing I learned re-listening has changed my view that this is – hands down – the most overrated record in pop music history.
  2. I’ve also said over and over that I don’t hate everything this band has done. And I derived some pleasure from this, more than I recall deriving before.
  3. I do inherently hate the tempos. Slow BPMs aren’t me. I’ve talked a lot about “sit and listen” records vs. “get up and move” records and this is one of THE poster children for the former outside of “Dark Side Of The Moon” (a record I very much like) and which I and others think this record tries to resemble (fairly unsuccessfully).
  4. I dislike the lack of balance, optimism, humo(u)r and tone in this record. I am not one for mopery. I'm too busy. I have too many things in my life I either enjoy, or tasks to complete which I will enjoy when done. Wallowing has never been me.
  5. The comments on production leave me conflicted. It is well-produced. But as I wrote about The Waterboys record, production is sometimes a way to cover up thin melody, and that is absolutely the case here, regularly. It’s not going to fool me. I know a hook when I hear one. There aren’t many (though there ARE more than I remember), and feedback, overdubs and the periodic use of a glockenspiel or some such other instrument isn’t going to trick me into thinking the sonics are a substitute.
  6. I can’t divorce what I know about the artist from the record. It’s meta – I get it. My comments about Thom Yorke wanting to be a rock star, not a musician, apply equally to Bono and U2 IMO, and for me it’s a major strike against them as artists. RH’s sound was 50,000-person arena suited from the beginning. They were offered a record contract early. Imagine them trying to grind their way through the bar band/club circuit. That’s where frustration and humility are born and worked through, where nearly all (not all but nearly all) great bands were once forged before the age of direct-to-audience-via-YouTube. These guys didn’t pay those kind of dues. Even the greatest arena rock band I’ve ever seen – Van Halen – did. How am I supposed to believe Thom’s tales of alienation knowing this? Worse, after he got famous, he moaned incessantly about how tough his life as a rock star is. The brothers Gallagher are often wrong about things, sometimes spectacularly, but when Noel said, “They’re stuck in the back of limousines telling you how bored they are being in a group. If you don’t enjoy it, retire. Do us all a favour. Or move to a mansion in Oxford so we don’t have to listen to you bleeding on about how shit your life is”, he’s right. You can’t get away from this when trying to contextualiz(s)e the misery Yorke sings about. If you can, you’re in denial. If he was singing about his own specific miseries without the ellipses, then okay. But he isn’t – which is why I think this becomes largely inauthentic. Even if I knew nothing about him – and I didn’t when I first heard this – I’d say (and did say) “What in the actual fuck is this guy talking about? WHO is he talking about? This is misery for misery’s sake.”
  7. I’ve already addressed this but I’ll repeat it: This is overrated because it’s NOT about a dsytopian now or future. It's about that only in RETROSPECT. Ask the band: "Radiohead have said they do not consider OK Computer a concept album and did not intend to link the songs through a narrative or unifying concept while it was being written." This creates a problem for some of those who love it because the intent they ascribe is and was not there - a classic consumer vs. creator issue in art generally. When I bring this up I get the take of “you just don’t understand” or “you need to listen to it more” or “you had to be there”. This is the crux of why I think it's overrated. @threespires noted this too.
  8. Now to the tunes. The most moving, and best, song on the record is “Fitter Happier.” It’s the one realized vision, the one universal. All of us have been force-fed a goal set and rules to live by that seem crushing and overwhelming, and by computerizing the vocals, the prescriptive directives take on a different, chilling, hopeless air. And because they are specific (and direct, unlike so much of the rest of the record), they have power. And because they aren’t “emoted” by Thom, they are authentic. And by the way – he wrote the lyrics in ten minutes. There’s a lesson there.
  9. I will say that I actually came away liking “Airbag” quite a bit more than I remembered. The echoey carry still irritates me, but the backbeat and chord changes hit me harder than I recall. I wish the band had carried that Soundgarden-y tempo along into other songs.
  10. The tune the band thought sounded least like Radiohead isn't THE best but it's the one I LIKE best – the closer “The Tourist.” Here the rather lovely chorus provides the melodic hook. It’s pointless, like nearly all the rest of these songs, but at least vaguely pretty.
  11. The most actual “song-form” song is “Karma Police”, which whilst I don’t love it, is good enough - better conceptually and aurally than their pre-OKC hits “High And Dry” and “Creep”, which I find pretty unbearable. Whilst I am unclear on what the Karma Police would be arresting anyone for (as usual, Thom’s idea trails off into nothingness), the idea that a Karma Police exists is pleasant to contemplate.
  12. “Subterranean Homesick Alien” is the greatest U2 imitation ever crafted. As such, it’s both imminently listenable and vomit-inducing in equal degrees.
  13. “Paranoid Android” - save the power-chord guitar-bridge - is infuriating. I’ll never get it. Of all the songs I've heard in my life, very few more than this tune do I have such a love/hate relationship with. I love parts of it. Then I hate it. Then I like it for 17.5 seconds. Then hate it for 31.9 seconds. Arrrrrrrgggggghhhhhh, make up your mind, you bastards.
  14. There are two awful, awful, AWFUL songs on this record. I absolutely cannot stand “Climbing The Walls” and “Exit Music (For A Film)”. The first is a horror film – I am actually physically revolted by the lyrics, and the tune is the usual slow march into tuneless blackness – and the second is so abstract I was actually floored when I read it was inspired by an image of Clare Danes with a gun to her head in “Romeo + Juliet”. In fact, I can find so little trace of all the influences Yorke et al said they had on this record (Miles Davis in particular), it’s almost as if he made all that shit up after the fact to give the record more heft. It drives me batty.
  15. Though I have spilled a lot of blood-words decrying the rampant cynicism I felt coursed through this record, now that I'm calmer, I’ve since softened my view and attribute at least some of what I thought was cynicism to Thom Yorke’s fundamental inability to write very well. He described these songs as “Polaroids” he took while passing through life. He is a misery voyeur, which annoys me, but there’s something else. In my mind, great art takes small things and spins them into big themes. This is precisely the opposite of that – an attempt to cram every negative observed into the world and force them into a 53-minute box. He also offers no hope for escape. No doubt as an inveterate optimist, which I am, neither the effort nor the outcome are going to resonate with me. But then I find this quote on Wikipedia: "Yorke said he did not want to do 'another miserable, morbid and negative record' " after "The Bends". Once again, this man's lack of self-knowledge is so low it can barely be charted, low even for a rock star.
  16. One theory I’ll float is that pasty-faced young adults who didn’t cotton to Nirvana’s sonics but needed an anthem to underscore their biological age-based malaise were ripe for oppositional music like this – slow, doleful, dark (albeit with bursts of guitar like on “Airbag”, “PA” or “Electioneering”). What irony that both Kurt and Thom claimed influence by The Pixies. Even more ironic that so many of you didn’t like “Doolittle”.
  17. The earlier point that there wasn’t a lot of good music released in 1997 and therefore this punches above its weight is interesting. I don’t think naught-else released in 1997 was good (and I know that wasn’t implied), and I will offer up my favo(u)rite 1997 record in future. But was 1997 thin compared to lots of other periods (1980-83, 1991-94)? Absolutely IMO.
  18. Here’s my blind spot, and it took some study and comments by some of you to get me to see this: I don’t have the appreciation Brits do for how this stomped on Britpop at the time, similar to how Nirvana stomped on hair metal. That’s because whilst Oasis, Blur, etc. were a thing over here, they weren’t THE thing they were over there. Whatever I think, Radiohead clearly tapped into something that struck a whale of a transformational chord musically, and I think this was part of the rapturous reception, and a part I didn’t appreciate. Whether accidental or intentional, cynical or heartfelt, none of us can deny its influence. And that is special.
  19. So if we put ALL of this in a blender, how do I score it? I’m not going to take the @threespires approach. I like it less musically than he does. But there are moments I’ve come to enjoy, and even feel. I’m not going to penali(z)e it for being so clinically overrated – that’s on all of you.
  20. I think for such a record, a special score is needed: Pi/10.​
Click to expand...
Very good. Bravo, sir and well done for not only sticking to your guns but actually taking the time to explain why it doesn't work for you in such an thoughtful, and at times funny, way. I know you've been lining this up for a long time, which I'll freely admit to being one of the reasons why we had to review this album sooner or later :)

I'm nowhere near ready to write my review yet but I'm surprised that you picked out "Fitter Happier" and "The Tourist" as positives because they are two songs that I'd gladly never hear again. We can definitely agree on "Climbing the Wall", which is godawful.

Some good observations on ascribing meaning of an overall concept after that fact. If what you are saying is true - and I've no reason to doubt it - it does make some of those championing the album on this basis look a little silly. But playing devil's advocate, people are free to assign any meaning to a piece of art as they see fit.
 
journolud said:
What a great line and I can fully empathise with it. I mentioned in my review of the Manchester Orchestra that sometimes when that melancholy mood hits me I don’t look for music to lift me out of it, I almost luxuriate in the feeling.

There’s a few Radiohead tracks that would make my melancholy playlist. Similar to others I prefer the Bends to this and listened to some of the stuff that came later more out of a sense of obligation than enjoyment. Subsequent albums do have their moments but they can also feel a bit heavy going.
Click to expand...

‘Let Down’ gives me that feeling.
 
FogBlueInSanFran said:
Deeeeeeeeeeeep breaths . . . here we go:

  1. Nothing I learned re-listening has changed my view that this is – hands down – the most overrated record in pop music history.
  2. I’ve also said over and over that I don’t hate everything this band has done. And I derived some pleasure from this, more than I recall deriving before.
  3. I do inherently hate the tempos. Slow BPMs aren’t me. I’ve talked a lot about “sit and listen” records vs. “get up and move” records and this is one of THE poster children for the former outside of “Dark Side Of The Moon” (a record I very much like) and which I and others think this record tries to resemble (fairly unsuccessfully).
  4. I dislike the lack of balance, optimism, humo(u)r and tone in this record. I am not one for mopery. I'm too busy. I have too many things in my life I either enjoy, or tasks to complete which I will enjoy when done. Wallowing has never been me.
  5. The comments on production leave me conflicted. It is well-produced. But as I wrote about The Waterboys record, production is sometimes a way to cover up thin melody, and that is absolutely the case here, regularly. It’s not going to fool me. I know a hook when I hear one. There aren’t many (though there ARE more than I remember), and feedback, overdubs and the periodic use of a glockenspiel or some such other instrument isn’t going to trick me into thinking the sonics are a substitute.
  6. I can’t divorce what I know about the artist from the record. It’s meta – I get it. My comments about Thom Yorke wanting to be a rock star, not a musician, apply equally to Bono and U2 IMO, and for me it’s a major strike against them as artists. RH’s sound was 50,000-person arena suited from the beginning. They were offered a record contract early. Imagine them trying to grind their way through the bar band/club circuit. That’s where frustration and humility are born and worked through, where nearly all (not all but nearly all) great bands were once forged before the age of direct-to-audience-via-YouTube. These guys didn’t pay those kind of dues. Even the greatest arena rock band I’ve ever seen – Van Halen – did. How am I supposed to believe Thom’s tales of alienation knowing this? Worse, after he got famous, he moaned incessantly about how tough his life as a rock star is. The brothers Gallagher are often wrong about things, sometimes spectacularly, but when Noel said, “They’re stuck in the back of limousines telling you how bored they are being in a group. If you don’t enjoy it, retire. Do us all a favour. Or move to a mansion in Oxford so we don’t have to listen to you bleeding on about how shit your life is”, he’s right. You can’t get away from this when trying to contextualiz(s)e the misery Yorke sings about. If you can, you’re in denial. If he was singing about his own specific miseries without the ellipses, then okay. But he isn’t – which is why I think this becomes largely inauthentic. Even if I knew nothing about him – and I didn’t when I first heard this – I’d say (and did say) “What in the actual fuck is this guy talking about? WHO is he talking about? This is misery for misery’s sake.”
  7. I’ve already addressed this but I’ll repeat it: This is overrated because it’s NOT about a dsytopian now or future. It's about that only in RETROSPECT. Ask the band: "Radiohead have said they do not consider OK Computer a concept album and did not intend to link the songs through a narrative or unifying concept while it was being written." This creates a problem for some of those who love it because the intent they ascribe is and was not there - a classic consumer vs. creator issue in art generally. When I bring this up I get the take of “you just don’t understand” or “you need to listen to it more” or “you had to be there”. This is the crux of why I think it's overrated. @threespires noted this too.
  8. Now to the tunes. The most moving, and best, song on the record is “Fitter Happier.” It’s the one realized vision, the one universal. All of us have been force-fed a goal set and rules to live by that seem crushing and overwhelming, and by computerizing the vocals, the prescriptive directives take on a different, chilling, hopeless air. And because they are specific (and direct, unlike so much of the rest of the record), they have power. And because they aren’t “emoted” by Thom, they are authentic. And by the way – he wrote the lyrics in ten minutes. There’s a lesson there.
  9. I will say that I actually came away liking “Airbag” quite a bit more than I remembered. The echoey carry still irritates me, but the backbeat and chord changes hit me harder than I recall. I wish the band had carried that Soundgarden-y tempo along into other songs.
  10. The tune the band thought sounded least like Radiohead isn't THE best but it's the one I LIKE best – the closer “The Tourist.” Here the rather lovely chorus provides the melodic hook. It’s pointless, like nearly all the rest of these songs, but at least vaguely pretty.
  11. The most actual “song-form” song is “Karma Police”, which whilst I don’t love it, is good enough - better conceptually and aurally than their pre-OKC hits “High And Dry” and “Creep”, which I find pretty unbearable. Whilst I am unclear on what the Karma Police would be arresting anyone for (as usual, Thom’s idea trails off into nothingness), the idea that a Karma Police exists is pleasant to contemplate.
  12. “Subterranean Homesick Alien” is the greatest U2 imitation ever crafted. As such, it’s both imminently listenable and vomit-inducing in equal degrees.
  13. “Paranoid Android” - save the power-chord guitar-bridge - is infuriating. I’ll never get it. Of all the songs I've heard in my life, very few more than this tune do I have such a love/hate relationship with. I love parts of it. Then I hate it. Then I like it for 17.5 seconds. Then hate it for 31.9 seconds. Arrrrrrrgggggghhhhhh, make up your mind, you bastards.
  14. There are two awful, awful, AWFUL songs on this record. I absolutely cannot stand “Climbing The Walls” and “Exit Music (For A Film)”. The first is a horror film – I am actually physically revolted by the lyrics, and the tune is the usual slow march into tuneless blackness – and the second is so abstract I was actually floored when I read it was inspired by an image of Clare Danes with a gun to her head in “Romeo + Juliet”. In fact, I can find so little trace of all the influences Yorke et al said they had on this record (Miles Davis in particular), it’s almost as if he made all that shit up after the fact to give the record more heft. It drives me batty.
  15. Though I have spilled a lot of blood-words decrying the rampant cynicism I felt coursed through this record, now that I'm calmer, I’ve since softened my view and attribute at least some of what I thought was cynicism to Thom Yorke’s fundamental inability to write very well. He described these songs as “Polaroids” he took while passing through life. He is a misery voyeur, which annoys me, but there’s something else. In my mind, great art takes small things and spins them into big themes. This is precisely the opposite of that – an attempt to cram every negative observed into the world and force them into a 53-minute box. He also offers no hope for escape. No doubt as an inveterate optimist, which I am, neither the effort nor the outcome are going to resonate with me. But then I find this quote on Wikipedia: "Yorke said he did not want to do 'another miserable, morbid and negative record' " after "The Bends". Once again, this man's lack of self-knowledge is so low it can barely be charted, low even for a rock star.
  16. One theory I’ll float is that pasty-faced young adults who didn’t cotton to Nirvana’s sonics but needed an anthem to underscore their biological age-based malaise were ripe for oppositional music like this – slow, doleful, dark (albeit with bursts of guitar like on “Airbag”, “PA” or “Electioneering”). What irony that both Kurt and Thom claimed influence by The Pixies. Even more ironic that so many of you didn’t like “Doolittle”.
  17. The earlier point that there wasn’t a lot of good music released in 1997 and therefore this punches above its weight is interesting. I don’t think naught-else released in 1997 was good (and I know that wasn’t implied), and I will offer up my favo(u)rite 1997 record in future. But was 1997 thin compared to lots of other periods (1980-83, 1991-94)? Absolutely IMO.
  18. Here’s my blind spot, and it took some study and comments by some of you to get me to see this: I don’t have the appreciation Brits do for how this stomped on Britpop at the time, similar to how Nirvana stomped on hair metal. That’s because whilst Oasis, Blur, etc. were a thing over here, they weren’t THE thing they were over there. Whatever I think, Radiohead clearly tapped into something that struck a whale of a transformational chord musically, and I think this was part of the rapturous reception, and a part I didn’t appreciate. Whether accidental or intentional, cynical or heartfelt, none of us can deny its influence. And that is special.
  19. So if we put ALL of this in a blender, how do I score it? I’m not going to take the @threespires approach. I like it less musically than he does. But there are moments I’ve come to enjoy, and even feel. I’m not going to penali(z)e it for being so clinically overrated – that’s on all of you.
  20. I think for such a record, a special score is needed: Pi/10.​
Click to expand...
Just Pixies mate. Everything else is fair, well thought out and coherent. But people seriously didn't like Doolittle? I think Pixies suffer from the fact that is kind of linked to point 5. A lot of people that ripped off Pixies did so with "better" production. Pixies sound "rubbish" and basic by comparison.

The production is undeniably great on everything post Pablo. Maybe I value that more than you as you have made lots of reference to hooks and melody and why Im more willing to overlook what you consider flaws
 
mrbelfry said:
Just Pixies mate. Everything else is fair, well thought out and coherent. But people seriously didn't like Doolittle? I think Pixies suffer from the fact that is kind of linked to point 5. A lot of people that ripped off Pixies did so with "better" production. Pixies sound "rubbish" and basic by comparison.

The production is undeniably great on everything post Pablo. Maybe I value that more than you as you have made lots of reference to hooks and melody and why Im more willing to overlook what you consider flaws
Click to expand...
Mate I think you misunderstand or I wasn’t clear — I LIKE Pixies — especially Doolittle — which I think I gave an 8. I was surprised many other regulars here didn’t care for it. If I take 3/4 of Doolittle and then sprinkle in some stuff from other records (like Gigantic and Dig for Fire), I have one fantastic record. Hell, I nominated and wrote on Breeders’ Last Splash too!
 
RobMCFC said:
Very good. Bravo, sir and well done for not only sticking to your guns but actually taking the time to explain why it doesn't work for you in such an thoughtful, and at times funny, way. I know you've been lining this up for a long time, which I'll freely admit to being one of the reasons why we had to review this album sooner or later :)

I'm nowhere near ready to write my review yet but I'm surprised that you picked out "Fitter Happier" and "The Tourist" as positives because they are two songs that I'd gladly never hear again. We can definitely agree on "Climbing the Wall", which is godawful.

Some good observations on ascribing meaning of an overall concept after that fact. If what you are saying is true - and I've no reason to doubt it - it does make some of those championing the album on this basis look a little silly. But playing devil's advocate, people are free to assign any meaning to a piece of art as they see fit.
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I like Fitter Happier better in concept than execution — reminds me a bit of OMD in their Dazzle Ships phase. But the creativity there is distinct. What can I say about “The Tourist”? It sounds like a different band, which is probably why I like it.
 
FogBlueInSanFran said:
Mate I think you misunderstand or I wasn’t clear — I LIKE Pixies — especially Doolittle — which I think I gave an 8. I was surprised many other regulars here didn’t care for it. If I take 3/4 of Doolittle and then sprinkle in some stuff from other records (like Gigantic and Dig for Fire), I have one fantastic record. Hell, I nominated and wrote on Breeders’ Last Splash too!
Click to expand...
I got it (you said people don't like Doolittle not you don't like Doolittle). I was trying to reach across the RH divide and find common ground. My enemies enemy kind of thing. Have a day
 
FogBlueInSanFran said:
Deeeeeeeeeeeep breaths . . . here we go:

  1. Nothing I learned re-listening has changed my view that this is – hands down – the most overrated record in pop music history.
  2. I’ve also said over and over that I don’t hate everything this band has done. And I derived some pleasure from this, more than I recall deriving before.
  3. I do inherently hate the tempos. Slow BPMs aren’t me. I’ve talked a lot about “sit and listen” records vs. “get up and move” records and this is one of THE poster children for the former outside of “Dark Side Of The Moon” (a record I very much like) and which I and others think this record tries to resemble (fairly unsuccessfully).
  4. I dislike the lack of balance, optimism, humo(u)r and tone in this record. I am not one for mopery. I'm too busy. I have too many things in my life I either enjoy, or tasks to complete which I will enjoy when done. Wallowing has never been me.
  5. The comments on production leave me conflicted. It is well-produced. But as I wrote about The Waterboys record, production is sometimes a way to cover up thin melody, and that is absolutely the case here, regularly. It’s not going to fool me. I know a hook when I hear one. There aren’t many (though there ARE more than I remember), and feedback, overdubs and the periodic use of a glockenspiel or some such other instrument isn’t going to trick me into thinking the sonics are a substitute.
  6. I can’t divorce what I know about the artist from the record. It’s meta – I get it. My comments about Thom Yorke wanting to be a rock star, not a musician, apply equally to Bono and U2 IMO, and for me it’s a major strike against them as artists. RH’s sound was 50,000-person arena suited from the beginning. They were offered a record contract early. Imagine them trying to grind their way through the bar band/club circuit. That’s where frustration and humility are born and worked through, where nearly all (not all but nearly all) great bands were once forged before the age of direct-to-audience-via-YouTube. These guys didn’t pay those kind of dues. Even the greatest arena rock band I’ve ever seen – Van Halen – did. How am I supposed to believe Thom’s tales of alienation knowing this? Worse, after he got famous, he moaned incessantly about how tough his life as a rock star is. The brothers Gallagher are often wrong about things, sometimes spectacularly, but when Noel said, “They’re stuck in the back of limousines telling you how bored they are being in a group. If you don’t enjoy it, retire. Do us all a favour. Or move to a mansion in Oxford so we don’t have to listen to you bleeding on about how shit your life is”, he’s right. You can’t get away from this when trying to contextualiz(s)e the misery Yorke sings about. If you can, you’re in denial. If he was singing about his own specific miseries without the ellipses, then okay. But he isn’t – which is why I think this becomes largely inauthentic. Even if I knew nothing about him – and I didn’t when I first heard this – I’d say (and did say) “What in the actual fuck is this guy talking about? WHO is he talking about? This is misery for misery’s sake.”
  7. I’ve already addressed this but I’ll repeat it: This is overrated because it’s NOT about a dsytopian now or future. It's about that only in RETROSPECT. Ask the band: "Radiohead have said they do not consider OK Computer a concept album and did not intend to link the songs through a narrative or unifying concept while it was being written." This creates a problem for some of those who love it because the intent they ascribe is and was not there - a classic consumer vs. creator issue in art generally. When I bring this up I get the take of “you just don’t understand” or “you need to listen to it more” or “you had to be there”. This is the crux of why I think it's overrated. @threespires noted this too.
  8. Now to the tunes. The most moving, and best, song on the record is “Fitter Happier.” It’s the one realized vision, the one universal. All of us have been force-fed a goal set and rules to live by that seem crushing and overwhelming, and by computerizing the vocals, the prescriptive directives take on a different, chilling, hopeless air. And because they are specific (and direct, unlike so much of the rest of the record), they have power. And because they aren’t “emoted” by Thom, they are authentic. And by the way – he wrote the lyrics in ten minutes. There’s a lesson there.
  9. I will say that I actually came away liking “Airbag” quite a bit more than I remembered. The echoey carry still irritates me, but the backbeat and chord changes hit me harder than I recall. I wish the band had carried that Soundgarden-y tempo along into other songs.
  10. The tune the band thought sounded least like Radiohead isn't THE best but it's the one I LIKE best – the closer “The Tourist.” Here the rather lovely chorus provides the melodic hook. It’s pointless, like nearly all the rest of these songs, but at least vaguely pretty.
  11. The most actual “song-form” song is “Karma Police”, which whilst I don’t love it, is good enough - better conceptually and aurally than their pre-OKC hits “High And Dry” and “Creep”, which I find pretty unbearable. Whilst I am unclear on what the Karma Police would be arresting anyone for (as usual, Thom’s idea trails off into nothingness), the idea that a Karma Police exists is pleasant to contemplate.
  12. “Subterranean Homesick Alien” is the greatest U2 imitation ever crafted. As such, it’s both imminently listenable and vomit-inducing in equal degrees.
  13. “Paranoid Android” - save the power-chord guitar-bridge - is infuriating. I’ll never get it. Of all the songs I've heard in my life, very few more than this tune do I have such a love/hate relationship with. I love parts of it. Then I hate it. Then I like it for 17.5 seconds. Then hate it for 31.9 seconds. Arrrrrrrgggggghhhhhh, make up your mind, you bastards.
  14. There are two awful, awful, AWFUL songs on this record. I absolutely cannot stand “Climbing The Walls” and “Exit Music (For A Film)”. The first is a horror film – I am actually physically revolted by the lyrics, and the tune is the usual slow march into tuneless blackness – and the second is so abstract I was actually floored when I read it was inspired by an image of Clare Danes with a gun to her head in “Romeo + Juliet”. In fact, I can find so little trace of all the influences Yorke et al said they had on this record (Miles Davis in particular), it’s almost as if he made all that shit up after the fact to give the record more heft. It drives me batty.
  15. Though I have spilled a lot of blood-words decrying the rampant cynicism I felt coursed through this record, now that I'm calmer, I’ve since softened my view and attribute at least some of what I thought was cynicism to Thom Yorke’s fundamental inability to write very well. He described these songs as “Polaroids” he took while passing through life. He is a misery voyeur, which annoys me, but there’s something else. In my mind, great art takes small things and spins them into big themes. This is precisely the opposite of that – an attempt to cram every negative observed into the world and force them into a 53-minute box. He also offers no hope for escape. No doubt as an inveterate optimist, which I am, neither the effort nor the outcome are going to resonate with me. But then I find this quote on Wikipedia: "Yorke said he did not want to do 'another miserable, morbid and negative record' " after "The Bends". Once again, this man's lack of self-knowledge is so low it can barely be charted, low even for a rock star.
  16. One theory I’ll float is that pasty-faced young adults who didn’t cotton to Nirvana’s sonics but needed an anthem to underscore their biological age-based malaise were ripe for oppositional music like this – slow, doleful, dark (albeit with bursts of guitar like on “Airbag”, “PA” or “Electioneering”). What irony that both Kurt and Thom claimed influence by The Pixies. Even more ironic that so many of you didn’t like “Doolittle”.
  17. The earlier point that there wasn’t a lot of good music released in 1997 and therefore this punches above its weight is interesting. I don’t think naught-else released in 1997 was good (and I know that wasn’t implied), and I will offer up my favo(u)rite 1997 record in future. But was 1997 thin compared to lots of other periods (1980-83, 1991-94)? Absolutely IMO.
  18. Here’s my blind spot, and it took some study and comments by some of you to get me to see this: I don’t have the appreciation Brits do for how this stomped on Britpop at the time, similar to how Nirvana stomped on hair metal. That’s because whilst Oasis, Blur, etc. were a thing over here, they weren’t THE thing they were over there. Whatever I think, Radiohead clearly tapped into something that struck a whale of a transformational chord musically, and I think this was part of the rapturous reception, and a part I didn’t appreciate. Whether accidental or intentional, cynical or heartfelt, none of us can deny its influence. And that is special.
  19. So if we put ALL of this in a blender, how do I score it? I’m not going to take the @threespires approach. I like it less musically than he does. But there are moments I’ve come to enjoy, and even feel. I’m not going to penali(z)e it for being so clinically overrated – that’s on all of you.
  20. I think for such a record, a special score is needed: Pi/10.​
Click to expand...

Ok wow. Please take this as respect and engagement. But I don't think there has ever been a comment on BM that had so much I disagreed with. Probably 17-18 of the points, if not something in all of them.

And not about this album, I should say, which I haven't yet heard out. But as a general set starting point, and an outlook/take. Or a prism to see things through.

Rather than going through them all and sounding maybe petty, I'll circle round in subsequent posts and touch on some of them from my perspective.

But I guess that has been the interesting side to this week, as much personal discussion and revelation about others here as about an album.
 
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