[Just a reminder: this is the last in a five-part series exploring the greatness that is Radiohead. If you haven't read the first four, skip down the page to Saturday, June 12, and work your way forward.] The battle of the voice for transcendence is nowhere more memorably staged in Radiohead’s work than in the video [...]
[Just a reminder: this is the third in a five-part series exploring the greatness that is Radiohead. If you haven't read the first two, skip down the page to Saturday, June 12, and work your way forward.] On Radiohead’s second album, The Bends, the same mythic battle plays out in songs like the first single, “Fake [...]
I suggested yesterday that we might think of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” as a kind of alternative-rock power ballad, and I promised to run through the song’s emotional arc. It starts simply, with Thom Yorke singing softly over a strummed acoustic guitar. The musical texture builds with each verse, adding by degrees bass, cello, electric [...]
Visually, the Pacer is the concert venue writ small, with three of the five passengers wearing rock t-shirts; its distinctive (ugly) contours suggest a listening space, albeit an extraordinarily cramped, and necessarily intimate, one. The scene is funny and familiar; heavy-metal kids, headbanging in the suburbs, trying to make some fun. But they’re also, in [...]
[Final installment in a three-part posting, republishing an essay that first appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education last September.--KD] I’ve already suggested that for some of us, the appeal of the bad voice is that it could be ours; more generally, we respond to bad voices because they sound so frail, so human. There’s [...]
1.0 A blog called “fake chinese rubber plant” has to comment on an album like this, right? I mean, to begin with, Gorillaz are a (proudly, self-proclaimed) “fake,” or virtual, band, the brainchild of Damon Albarn, from the Britpop band Blur, and comic-book artist Jamie Hewlett; their music videos are animated, with cartoon character band [...]
So, no big wind-up this time. Track 7, “My Body Is a Cage.” Few—none?—have ever accused The Arcade Fire of being insufficiently portentous. “My Body Is a Cave,” in this respect, is vintage AF: the big church organ just gets bigger and bigger as the song moves inexorably on; if you like this kind of [...]
It’s been pointed out to me that for folks not as toxically obsessed with Radiohead as I am, this might require a bit of explanation. When I decided to do a blog—which is to say, when my friend and editor Shannon told me I need to start a blog—I was visiting my daughter Audrey and [...]