Radiohead- A Moon Shaped Pool (2016)

Radiohead- A Moon Shaped Pool (2016)

By: Ghost Writer

It might have to do a lot with the way marketing works these days, like the old saying: "good products don't need marketing campaigns", marketing can create a monster and in the end when you put your hands in the product, you end up with a big bag of hot air and nothing else, I don't know, I have a long love/hate relationship with Radiohead, falling in love with some of their most abstract songs, and simply loathing their most popular stuff, A Moon Shaped Pool is their latest recording, it was preceded by a very interesting marketing campaign, first the band web page, and other pages disappearing from the Internet, causing a big buzz from their fans, and then the arriving of Burn the Witch with a pretty enigmatic stop motion animation video, yes, Radiohead has proven to pretty wise marketing speaking, and this time they have pulled a new trick, comparable to the one they used for In Rainbows when they "shared" their material in their web page and the fans named their price, in the end In Rainbows was sold as a physical cd at record stores, it was just a trick, and in the end, A Moon Shaped Pool is also a trick, half of the album is composed of previously known songs, some of them leftovers from previous records, some of them previously played alive.

The problem with A Moon Shaped Pool, making a big difference from In Rainbows is the fact that there is no great music here, some of the songs precisely sound like leftovers, but really bad ones, perhaps opener Burn the Witch is one of the few good ones, it's urgent string motif and Yorke's enigmatic vocals show promise, but things go down right from there, as Daydreaming is just a boring musical exercise without much purpose, while Decks Dark despite a goof melody id a little naked in the end.

Desert Island Disk has the typical Tuareg influenced guitar lines we know Yorke for, but nothing besides that, an atmospheric accompaniment that's just too subtle to take the song anywhere, yes, is a good song but nothing remarkable, and although they visit krautrock on Ful Stop, is nothing really transcendental compared to what they have done before with the German Kosmische stuff.

Some of the most ethereal stuff Yorke and company have done seems to be greatly inspired by a record like Future Day, and that's precisely what happens with Identikit where Yorke does his best Damo Suzuki impersonation, while the rest of the band goes in full Can ambient inspired mood.

The Numbers have some good sounding psychedelia, but again, nothing memorable, and the rest of the disk is simply boring filler that I can't imagine it having much repercussion, Radiohead has worked a very interesting marketing campaign, but they simply have forgotten the most important ingredients in a successful musical career good songs.