A Moon Shaped Pool

Radiohead dropped their ninth studio album today.  A Moon Shaped Pool.  Just two full headphone listens in, it is an instant classic and worthy of the band's nearly unparalleled canon.  My first listen came while walking my dog, the low-hanging clouds of a wet-soaked Mother's Day holding in the smell of wet grass in my lungs.  Perfect weather to accompany the record.  I had that giddy moment where just at the midpoint of my first listen, I understood that I was hearing a masterpiece.  It is one of the most exciting feelings any music nerd can have during a first listen: self-aware reckoning of a classic before the music has even stopped playing.

Radiohead's symphonic record is an easy shorthand.  Jonny Greenwood's cinematic arrangements (with gorgeous strings provided by the London Contemporary Orchestra) cut through many of the tracks in arresting ways.  Other early instrumental impressions: the striking piano/keyboard runs, the ridiculous guitar solo (a Radiohead guitar solo!) on "Identikit," and the slithery baselines that undergird many tracks.  The band has created something massive sounding and deeply intimate in one fell swoop.

Spectral, cavernous, and beautiful, the record may be the most Radiohead-ey thing they have ever released.  It sounds like what I hear in my head when I think of the band.  Perhaps it is the fact that many of the songs have been in gestation for so long, including long-time fan favorite "True Love Waits," which serves the role of crushing closer.  That is not to say the album does not feel fresh or in-the-moment, especially with many exciting instrumental episodes like the savage strings on opener "Burn the Witch" or the soft-hewn keys on "Daydreaming."  It just feels strangely familiar in all the best of ways.

The band deconstructed the titanic rock record - their own! - on Kid A and then, after furious political agitation on Hail to the Thief, arced through interpersonal drama on In Rainbows.  The King of Limbs followed, which felt more like a collection of disparate sonic experiments pulling the band in myriad directions: skittering electronica, haunting acoustic rock, and downtempo dirges to name just a few.  A Moon Shaped Pool seems to move beyond any useful narrative.  Out past the paranoia or the politics, it settles into the thick of thick things, weighing and considering life's mysteries, resisting at times the nagging sense of dread with something approaching resolve.  But how long can the center hold?

And the video below?  Sheesh.