starts with 'everything in it's right place' which is like a statement of intent for an album intent on paradoxes and weird juxtapositions, kind of warbles like they're groping for sense and calm and they've got an ideal in their heads but they can't quite reach it and it's all a little confusing. information overload, excess of everything, everything seeping into everything else. yesterday i woke up sucking a lemon is an oblique reference to thom's weird ass face, like his eye is shut like that cause he wakes up every morning with something sour in his mouth. i know a lot of people who think this is the most intense song on the album, i'm not sure about that, but i think it's definitive of the band's music at that moment in time. everything is quite obviously not in its right place but somehow that not-rightness just feels so right, you know?
title track sounds so crumpled and innocent, alien/child's grasp of a world slipping away the more he's exposed to all of crazy modernity of high tech gizmos where everyones allowed everything all of the time so much noise! it's not sad exactly because this whole album is so creepily unsentimental and direct, but there's something sort of disturbingly tragic about this child lost amidst all the sensory overload. not saying thats the overt concept btw that's just what it feels like. these guys are fucking mentalists and i doubt they have the capacity to conceptualise. god i love how all the instruments blend together, the vocals could be an instrument and the instruments could be singing and all i know is it's so goddamned organic. when that overpowering synth fades in or whatever it is and it just recontextualises everything somehow, implies the sheer vastness of everything around him and you're so small and it's so intimate and nothing exists except you and the music inside this chasm.
the national anthem i didn't like one time which was really retarded of me. the way it builds into this on-the-brink frenzy like something's gonna shatter and the world will fall apart. ahh it's so awesome, that fumbling bassline is just so cool. so desperate and wild and then it ends on those ridiculously discordant trumpet farts or whatever, that fucking owns.
how to disappear completely... dislocation alienation can't really feel anythin even if everythin explodes around you im in my own little bubble etc. kind of too obvious and i liked it more as a teen but it does really work and what's most interesting about it is it sounds liek he's trying to convince himself because he's horrified of the possibility of being exposed, it's a self-defense mechanism and he's kind of retreating inside into his dreamworld and again it's totally hypnotic and tragic and then it all starts to warp at the end for a bit and it's like pointing to its own artificiality and god i don't know the metaphors are endless with this fucking album
treefingers is totally amazing and i just get lost in it every time. i don't know what to say about it, obviously it's a transitional track, maybe that space between blakes innocence and experience or something? it's like how can something so intimate and tender also be so vast and all-encompassing, it just makes sure it's your whole world for the 222 or so seconds of its runtime. i'm p much an ambient noob and this song makes me think shit i need to delve deep into that genre. note: not a wrong note yet. i can't remember if there's a bad note in the second half but i don't think so. and when i say bad imean, like, this is musical zugzwang, change the tiniest thing and you lessen its impact.
optimistic! immediately more of a rocker, less enveloping and haunting, although still more enveloping and haunting than most things. this is one acidic piece of satire ain't it, but that is ultimately overwhelmed by this lingering sense that it's straining to believe in itself. dunno what that ending is lol, but i kind of like that they can just do spontaneous inane shit like that and it just works and isn't even questionable. i wonder if it has a thematic purpose or is just random radiohead weirdness.
in limbo started. most enigmatic song on the album? it's the one i can never remember but when i listen to it i think it's amazing. you can't grasp this, it just slips on through. i like how like half the lyrics on the album can be construed as self-referential. or maybe i hate it? fucking oxford pomo cunts. another escape, another idyllic landscape distorted, another dream disturbed by ripples. another weird distorted ending like all meaning and truth is collapsing.
idioteque, greatest song of the decade, greatest song of their careers. song i've most listened to by like a billion miles according to last fm. one of those songs where if you describe it you could just as easily describe it with the opposite adjectives. it's just everything. that's probably an analytical cop out but this song is greater than my puny brain and will probably stay that way. wait, this song IS my brain. it's all our brains man :'( giant brain stew. btw people who don't like thom yorke's vox are unfathomable and this song is why. and the music is like whale songs or something it just aches and keens and it's just the most beautiful thing imaginable.
most underrated song on the album comes next. underrated because it's the second best song of their careers, and people who prefer the amnesiac version are literally satanic. like i have nothing to say to those meatheads. absurd alien vision of everyday life or something i guess, the otherness of it and the unsettled unresolved ambiguity really peaks here. it just maintains the tension to such a ridiculous extent, it makes practically every other piece of music anywhere ever look clichéd.
motion picture soundtrack... i love the way everything gets more real and tangible and then by the end it's like time's passed by and there's so much weight now and he's so jaded. ahh the tragedy of it, and to think how far we've come
. and he says i will see you in the next life but literally once this album has finished radiohead are no way ever gonna serve as muse to such cosmic divinity again, or even try. no need to bother. what's left to be communicated?
