Radiohead From the Basement

  On 7/16/2011 at 11:12 PM, jhonny said:

Bloom and Staircase from the FTB session are better than anything on TKOL, simply amazing stuff

the studio codex is just amazing for me but I'm leaning in your direction. I really love the little by little from ftb. it sounds a lot funkier and trippy.

  On 7/20/2011 at 7:30 AM, GORDO said:

just noticed something curious, pay attention at the start of little by little you will notice yorke as orchestra director.

 

in my other post (why so serious) i was thinking that for most of the video the band seems like studio musicians just concentrating on getting it right rather than playing something they like and this little detail confirms that notion a lil bit.

Why do you assume that musicians play something they don't like if they are orchestrated?

Have you ever seen Miles Davis during the 1970's?

why do you assume i'm assuming anything like that?

Because you make a direct connection between Thom being a conductor for the rest of the band, and the difference between them "concentrating on getting it right" versus "playing something they like".

What I see is the same than Miles Davis in the 70's, or Bob Dylan during his Never-ending Tour

No, I'm making a connection between them seeming to be concentrating on getting it right rather than enjoying it and thom directing every detail with the notion that radiohead is just now thom with a backing band.

sessions musicians may or may not like what they are paid to play. my point was that they look like session musicians not that they don't like the songs.

  On 7/22/2011 at 1:44 AM, GORDO said:

No, I'm making a connection between them seeming to be concentrating on getting it right rather than enjoying it and thom directing every detail with the notion that radiohead is just now thom with a backing band.

 

sessions musicians may or may not like what they are paid to play. my point was that they look like session musicians not that they don't like the songs.

maybe its just because they wanted to nail every song as best they could since it was being taped for tv? they played many takes of every song. they certainly didnt look like that during the glastonbury show.

they are also one of the most professional bands around these days are are always concentrating on expanding their sound and doing new things. they are all amazing musicians in one of the most influential bands of the last 15 years. why anyone would think they are all just doing what thom says to do now is just outside of my realm of thinking. when thom wants full control, he does it solo.

i like the idea of comparing Radiohead to the Miles Davis band. it's not necessarily accurate to the t, obviously, but still adds a layer of thought to this modern rock music.

  On 7/13/2011 at 12:14 AM, kaini said:

i'd love to show the radiohead of 2011 to the radiohead of 1992 and see what they think

that would be very interesting indeed.

  On 7/22/2011 at 2:20 PM, keltoi said:

  On 7/13/2011 at 12:14 AM, kaini said:

i'd love to show the radiohead of 2011 to the radiohead of 1992 and see what they think

 

that would be very interesting indeed.

i'd love to show the jules of 2011 to the jules of 1992 and see what he thinks.

that prick.

  On 7/22/2011 at 2:48 PM, jules said:

  On 7/22/2011 at 2:20 PM, keltoi said:

  On 7/13/2011 at 12:14 AM, kaini said:

i'd love to show the radiohead of 2011 to the radiohead of 1992 and see what they think

 

that would be very interesting indeed.

 

 

i'd love to show the jules of 2011 to the jules of 1992 and see what he thinks.

 

 

that prick.

actually this is an interesting topic worthy of it's own thread. i'd like to go out partying with '92 me.

  On 7/22/2011 at 2:34 AM, jules said:

  On 7/22/2011 at 1:44 AM, GORDO said:

No, I'm making a connection between them seeming to be concentrating on getting it right rather than enjoying it and thom directing every detail with the notion that radiohead is just now thom with a backing band.

 

sessions musicians may or may not like what they are paid to play. my point was that they look like session musicians not that they don't like the songs.

 

maybe its just because they wanted to nail every song as best they could since it was being taped for tv? they played many takes of every song. they certainly didnt look like that during the glastonbury show.

 

they are also one of the most professional bands around these days are are always concentrating on expanding their sound and doing new things. they are all amazing musicians in one of the most influential bands of the last 15 years. why anyone would think they are all just doing what thom says to do now is just outside of my realm of thinking. when thom wants full control, he does it solo.

surely it's because of that (but they had multiple takes and one song has a mistake anyway) even tho past FTB sessions aren't anything like that, i was just sharing my impression, and that bit at the start of little by little only reinforced it (have you at least tried to check what im talking about?). But i would disagree with radiohead being one of the most professional bands, their live shows are often riddled with false starts and mistakes. why anyone would think that?

i did check out what you were saying. comparing ftb's is like comparing albums, kind of pointless imo.

i just feel like people are nitpicking the hell out of stuff. do you really think jonny greenwood would sit there and say ok thom, whatever you want. ill put my name on anything you say it is ok to put my name on and ill forget everything i have learned throughout my life and play how you want me to play. give me a break. these guys are very calculated and they know what they are doing.

again, i'm not nitpicking or complaining, just sharing an impression the performance gave me. I like it lots but the expressions on their faces really drew my attention (because, as i said before in other live performances they don't look like this) and listening that "slip" (the album version is how johnny was playing it) and seeing how yorke simply shuts johnny down then tells him when it's ok to start playing seemed an interesting enough detail to me.

But i have to say why do you think you know what's going on anyway? maybe it's something the band agreed upon, that their role for King of Limbs would be just a support one? maybe thom is an evil egomaniac who's holding the radiohead brand hostage in return for total control? unlikely, but who knows? maybe they all simply accepted what their role and ambitions in and for the band are? Even from the studio album some people commented (myself included) that they couldn't hear much of the band's contribution in there. to me all this show is that somehting's changed, but that's to be expected since time does not pass in vain.

  On 7/22/2011 at 10:01 PM, GORDO said:

again, i'm not nitpicking or complaining, just sharing an impression the performance gave me. I like it lots but the expressions on their faces really drew my attention (because, as i said before in other live performances they don't look like this) and listening that "slip" (the album version is how johnny was playing it) and seeing how yorke simply shuts johnny down then tells him when it's ok to start playing seemed an interesting enough detail to me.

 

But i have to say why do you think you know what's going on anyway? maybe it's something the band agreed upon, that their role for King of Limbs would be just a support one? maybe thom is an evil egomaniac who's holding the radiohead brand hostage in return for total control? unlikely, but who knows? maybe they all simply accepted what their role and ambitions in and for the band are? Even from the studio album some people commented (myself included) that they couldn't hear much of the band's contribution in there. to me all this show is that somehting's changed, but that's to be expected since time does not pass in vain.

yea, just like you, it is just my impression. i just have a hard time believing that the band is just going to listen to thom when he has a solo output for that. and likewise, artistically speaking, why would thom want to direct the band 100% when he has worked with them for so long. surely radiohead would be in a different place if they only listened to what thom says 100% of the time. im sure his creative input is followed more than others but the radiohead influence and especially jonny's is undeniable throughout the structure of these songs. his influence is just less obvious than thom's, naturally.

edit, here is something a friend of mine sent me, not sure where its from, a radiohead board im assuming, but it pretty much nips all of this in the bud, imo

  Quote

i guess i'll start with the obvious, lotus flower, cos it's the one track which could reasonably be argued to sound like it came off the eraser. it's got that soulful, loose melodic style he's been leaning towards more and more since the eraser came out. it's got a beat that, superficially, could come straight off the eraser, but i'll get back to why that's not quite the case. it's the most stripped down song on the album in that it's essentially just the beats, some synths, and thom, with a bass line that i'm pretty sure is actually synthesized (as opposed to the rest of the album which is definitely an actual bass guitar.) that combined with the ambiance in the background, it sounds very sparse at first listen.

 

but there's a big difference between this song and the eraser - this has an obsessive attention to detail that eraser can't touch. those beats, which are a mix of drum machine and sampled live drums, are doctored to perfection, it's like the awesome stream of simple variations on one guitar riff they do in i might be wrong almost, except in drum form. jonny is credited with producing 'pulled apart by horses' with thom, but what could he have possibly done? it's all in the arrangement, the way things are cut up and repositioned through the duration of the song creates a narrative. the drums are this are so similar to pulled apart by horses, other than being a totally different rhythmic hook, but it still has that 'melodic drumming' aspect, by which i mean the drums almost tell the story of the song by themselves just by how carefully the fills are placed. any of those moments where an unexpected 'ta-ta-ta-ta-ta series of eighth notes fill comes surging out from the mix sends shivers down my spine cos it's so perfectly placed and not overused, or any of those moments where the drums cut out so you can pay attention to the creepy synths or heavily effects-laden guitar parts without distraction, carried through by the amazingly catchy melody, it's just signature radiohead, and it speaks volumes about what jonny's contribution to the band really is. i'm pretty sure he played a huge role in how this album was put together musically cos this level of sonic story-telling is far beyond what thom demonstrated on the eraser.

 

sticking with lotus flower, that's another difference - the call-and-response of the quietly screeching high notes in the background, always at key points in the song. it was until now, maybe 50 listens later, that i started really tuning into how that morbid synth works together with the processed guitars and other sound effects to create a sort of song structure on top of the existing song structure. that's something they pretty much perfected on in rainbows, the linear song, but that was an album of songs which could pretty much all have been singles - this is pushing it. it's much darker, more in the vein of kid amnesiac as far as mood is concerned.

 

the eraser, on the other hand, is totally off the cuff and frankly a bit sloppy. it's like thom wrote an album of bedroom folk songs but using a laptop instead of a guitar. it was fast and messy and spontaneous, and personally i found it charming, but it had very little attention to detail. there was nowhere near this level of editing and rearranging. in the case of that album, beats and synths and chopped up piano parts really DID drone on with little to no reprieve. whatever can be said stylistically about the similarities between that album and this, song structure finesse is not one of them. even the melodies, which were the obvious focus of the eraser, were far messier and more spontaneous. they didn't have this pop catchyness, the hooks, the cocaine-like need to be experienced over and over until you drain your body of dopamine. the melody to lotus flower is one of THOSE hooks, and even the rhythm of it overlaps with the percussion in a way that makes both catchier than they are by themselves. also, it's known that a number of the songs off the eraser were rejected by the band. if this material hadn't been strong enough for the band to turn into something special, he could've kept the best ideas and dumped the rest off on another thom solo album. it's not like thom needs the radiohead name to sell CD's anymore.

 

while i'm on the topic of things thom doesn't do so well by himself, someone said the bass lines on this album sounded more like thom than colin? as a bass player for over 10 years i'm calling this as total horseshit. thom is NOT a good bass player, in the sense that colin is. yeah, the bass lines on the eraser were catchy, they were angular, they drove the songs to an extent, but they were repetitive, one dimensional looped riffs, basically the way a rhythm guitarist would write a bass line. colin plays like an actual bass player - he lays back, listens for spaces to fill, selects only the notes that are missing for his bass fills, and generally doesn't cause a fuss, while simultaneously being indispensable to the song simply through the impact he gives them. the bass lines on this album are just like that - they're powerful, but also mature and selective. he's a laid back guy and these are laid back bass lines. not thrashy, attention-seeking riffs like the national anthem or harrowdown hill, or probably paperback writer too now that i think of it. the bass on this album could be the bass on cuttooth, on dollars & cents, on most of in rainbows probably. the main difference is in the tone the songwriting sets.

 

that's an important thing to note - there is SOME similarity in the raw songwriting style. the more bluesy, spontaneous style of singing on the eraser obviously influenced later material and was obviously part of his progression as a songwriter. but that influence didn't just show up on friday. it was all over in rainbows. tell me that the bluesy falsetto on reckoner doesn't come from the same place fundamentally as many of the songs off the eraser and many of the songs off the king of limbs. that song was met with some suspicion when it first came out because it reminded people of the red hot chili peppers. people got over it quickly cos it was obviously awesome, but then in rainbows was an album of obvious songs with obvious production.

 

on the flip side, it's not like thom didn't attempt some attention to detail on the eraser, because he did. it's full of glitchy beats and sound effects. but the quality control isn't there, it wasn't second-guessed to the extent that radiohead songs are and you can hear it in how he wears his electronic influences on his sleeve. it doesn't sound 'orchestrated' by any stretch of the imagination. it was a load of fun thom had on his laptop in between shows and it sounds like it. to say this new album is the equivalent of that is frankly mind-boggling. take something like morning mr. magpie, in my mind stylistically a very un-eraser-like song - there's lots of space in the production. listen to those call and response guitars, how they arpeggiate with a nice full open sound at the beginning to introduce the song, then back off to let the vocals introduce themselves, and the perfect timing of when that syncopated bass jumps in - which to reiterate, is well beyond thom's grasp as a bass player, has too many subtle, unobtrusive melodic fills. after that, the jazzy guitar fills in the right channel which are no doubt jonny, like something out of talk show host... those gorgeous guitar chords that descend in tandem with the 'stole my melody' lyrics, then the lyricless bridge where the lead guitar, electronic side of the drums and bass all converge on that one simple rhythm which essentially the whole song orbits around but isn't revealed until that one, sublimely spooky moment that defines and climaxes the song. the rising and falling atmospheric sounds which are no doubt ed, only really growing in volume significantly when a key phase of the song is approaching or occurring. the idea that thom could sort that all out by himself is absurd beyond reasoning, especially when something as amateurish by comparison as the eraser is out there already. compare something like what i just described - and i just described a song that pretty much everyone except me considers in the bottom 2 or 3 songs on the album - to something like cymbal rush, which is basically one of thom's less distinct piano parts made more palatable by an almost completely unadorned electronic loop and a single spooky synth chord progression, and a growingly erratic acoustic drum part.

 

not that how i described cymbal rush couldn't be used to to help describe a radiohead song - sit down stand up comes to mind immediately - but in most cases, it couldn't be used to completely describe a radiohead song. no matter how unfamiliar - tonally, rhythmically, in production, whatever - a radiohead song appears at first, those familiar tools always surfuce, those song structures on top of song structures. and you know what? that's the way it is with most bands where everyone writes their own part. solo songs follow a single idea more or less because one person wrote them. songs written by 5 piece bands, generally speaking, sound like 5 similar but separate songs playing at once, because each member has their own musical vocabulary that they use to flesh out songs written by the lead songwriter out. all that familiar vocabulary is present in these songs, i just touched briefly on the one that came to mind while i was writing this but if i had the patience i could do it, note for note, for every single song on this album by now. it's definitely radiohead, i mean plenty of people have said at various times in their career that they lost the spark, so i mean if you feel that way about this one then fair enough, but these are definitely radiohead songs. you're in a band dude, you know this already, why does this have to be explained?

 

a hopefully short aside about the songwriting style and how it might remind someone of the eraser: overall, yeah, i can hear some of the eraser in this. those were his songs ultimately, and he writes almost all of radiohead's songs, at least at the fundamental 'here's the chords and melody what do you guys think we should do with it' level. there was the same looseness and sort of chorus-less song structures and less self-conscious melodies on in rainbows. the difference was that A) in rainbows was stocked with stronger songs from the beginning and radiohead contributed the previously mentioned songs-within-songs, which the eraser clearly lacks. but also, songs like mr. magpie and little by little have the same sinister harmonic minor rock-blues undertones as songs like i might be wrong and morning bell - very characteristic of the kid amnesiac era obviously. little by little is straight out of the hail to the thief mold, no doubt about it. the kind of chords and rhtyhms they play on songs like give up the ghost are like reckoner meets house of cards, and the melodic content on that song is no less rich or memorable - possibly more, as much as i love reckoner i always did feel a little skeletal and maybe sold short in terms of pure layers of music. the arpeggiating electric guitars in opposite channels on that song are like let down meets in rainbows and the rarely-heard chorus of the song is an awful lot like the rarely-heard chorus of bodysnatchers - which, by the way, is one of the many songs with an almost never-changing drum beat on that album, which people conveniently forget when comparing that album to the king of limbs. i think the drum beat in all i need might change once - it goes from the hi-hat to the crash cymbal. no one said phil wasn't an influence on those songs. in fact when that came out, people were saying the same thing they are now - that phil and colin are influencing the sound of the band more than ever.

 

and one more hopefully shorter short aside on the production: when i heard kid a for the first time, it sounded like yanni or some shit. i could literally not hear the songs, the song structures, the melodies, any of it. it was just ambiance. nice ambiance, but essentially homework music. it took me a YEAR, starting out as a metalhead, to even notice all the songs on it were songs in the traditional sense (with the obvious exception of treefingers.) just a little perspective on what that amount of space and effects can do to a person's ears at first. this album is super reverb-y, but so were kid a and amnesiac. it obviously depends on the specific song, but some of those songs are just as difficult to decipher sonically as any song on this album. and many of those songs had the same super dry, repetitive, and often sampled live drums that this album has, and in fact that in rainbows had, and that the eraser had, and in fact everything that radiohead and nigel have been involved in since kid a, with the exception of hail to the thief (infamous for being done quickly and with as little attention to detail as possible.)

Caught this on TV the other night but fell asleep before the end. It was incredible. I'm glad this thread showed up, DL'ing now.

Well done WATMM

So this STILL hasn't been shown on BBC TV in the UK?

BBC had the rights but declined to broadcast it at the last minute so Radiohead are trying to get it shown on some other channel (Sky Arts most likely)

It seems like a lot of their semi good/bad songs are all fantastic live. I mean, listen to this..

[youtubehd]WfFtIcQlpQk[/youtubehd]

yeah that version is great, shame they didn't play it much, i even learned the piano for it.

  On 7/26/2011 at 9:57 PM, GORDO said:

yeah that version is great, shame they didn't play it much, i even learned the piano for it.

gordo what do you think about thom being in full control after reading that piece i posted before? i thought that was a very interesting piece.

I kinda glanced through it and couldn't tell what point he was trying to make other than comparing songs across albums so :shrugs:

wow really?

yeah and i can't relate at all with the way he describes the music, also now that i read it with a bit more attention it sounds like he was a bit high lol. but surely i have to give some proper listens to the album because i haven't noticed the attention to detail that he talks about.

  On 7/26/2011 at 10:13 AM, The CIA said:

BBC had the rights but declined to broadcast it at the last minute so Radiohead are trying to get it shown on some other channel (Sky Arts most likely)

What the absolute fuck? That's ridiculous. Hopefully it'll be Sky Arts, they've been showing a LOT of good stuff recently, including all the From The Basement series.

So u guys all pretty much have English accents, huh? I'd better change my internal narrative voice when reading this board.