Radiothread - All I Want Is The Moon Upon a Stick

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Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

Incredible album. The Numbers reminds me deeply of Wooden Ships by Crosby Stills and Nash, which is kind of a vibe I'm getting from a lot of the songs on the album. It's a very Folk-oriented album with R&B influences I've not heard from them before. Looking forward to the From The Basement version (hopefully)

# ¿ May 8, 2016 20:26

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 02:32

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

I think Decks Dark is one of my favourite Radiohead songs ever now. There aren't any weak points on this record and that makes me very happy.

# ¿ May 9, 2016 05:59

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

Listening to it on day 2, having slept on it, I'm pretty sure this is my favourite Radiohead album from beginning to end. Radiohead has always been an outlier in my musical taste, which mostly lie in classic rock, blues, folk, and jazz. Even the few contemporary artists that I do like tend to draw mainly from that pool of classic influences. Radiohead was always influenced mainly by bands and sounds I was never into, but somehow this album seems to create the link between my tastes and theirs that wasn't there before. I used to have to dip back into my old library if I wanted to hear those folk and blues influences that I grew up on, and now I can listen to this album. That's a big deal to me.

If I wanted to get my parents to like Radiohead, I think this is the album I'd try with first.

# ¿ May 9, 2016 17:49

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

As someone who didn't get into Radiohead until not too long after TKOL came out and therefore never had any expectations, wishes, let-downs, etc., I consider it to be one of my favourites albums. I've probably listened to it more than OK Computer. It's not a better album of course, but I find it a more interesting trip. Especially From The Basement, but both versions are excellent. I don't think Radiohead has ever released anything I don't like to listen to start-to-finish (even HTTT) except maybe Com Lag since I'm not a fan of the remixes on it.

On that note, Paperbag Writer is some poo poo. I don't think Radiohead has ever played it, but
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tXpMgT2aXA

# ¿ May 28, 2016 17:41

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

I agree. I think it's because the most noticeable syncopated part is Colin's bass line, which is not in the studio version. The Basement version has a back-and-forth pulling effect as Thom's melody lives in the space between Colin's bass notes. Without that, everyone is just playing a beat behind the drums which kind of just kind of changes the rhythm rather than making it sound syncopated.

# ¿ May 29, 2016 17:00

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

Popcorn posted:

Since people seem to be confused: syncopation is not at all unusual. It's just when some element in a song (a kick drum, the notes in a bassline, a melody, whatever) fall between the normal beats of a song, instead of exactly on the beat. It's in ten billion zillion pieces of music.

The thing Radiohead do repeatedly is hide the syncopation, so you think the stuff is falling on one beat, but actually you're hearing the beat wrong. They do it on Identikit, for example; they cut off the first beat of the drum track, so for the first few bars of the song, you're feeling it "wrong". It's intentionally disorienting and cool as gently caress and yes, as Zodiac points out, I do never stop going on about it, but, well, since people seem to be asking...

edit: here is the most notorious example, the "correct" way to hear Videotape (ie how the band hears it but no one else): http://popcorn.gunsha.com/videotape%20syncopated.mp3

Yeah you're right nobody else ever hears it that way
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH3GGREPj-c#t=2m30s

Volte fucked around with this message at 16:27 on May 31, 2016

# ¿ May 31, 2016 16:24

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

Pool Was Shaped By A Moon.

# ¿ Jul 4, 2016 15:33

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

I prefer From The Basement as far as TKOL goes for listening to (and the live versions in general: Bloom, Feral, Lotus Flower, and Magpie are among their finest live tracks I think) but I think the album itself is perfect as far as being one of the canonical Radiohead LPs. The live versions are a lot more organic and loose than the extremely tightly engineered studio versions, so having perfect reference versions of all the songs on the LP fits the Radiohead style better. It's almost the opposite of A Moon Shaped Pool, where the live versions of the songs tend to sound overly sparse compared to the full sound of the album.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2018 14:31

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

BeanpolePeckerwood posted:

From the Basement is pretty decent, I'd say, but there's a little too much loving around in the background between takes for my liking and the track order just doesn't work for me.

I agree about the loving around but I have a mix that removes all the spaces for a more album-like experience. There's one on Youtube which is trivially searchable, I dunno if embedding it is kosher in NMD.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2018 19:42

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

lelandjs posted:

Thom put up a 10-track HTTT playlist a few years back that might be worth listening to if you haven�t already:

Seeing Thom's list awhile ago (and not caring for it) inspired me to make my own on Spotify.

2+2=5
Sit Down
Where I End
Go To Sleep
Sail to the Moon
I Will
Punch Up
Myxomatosis
Scatterbrain
There There
Gagging Order
Wolf at the Door

Rageaholic Monkey posted:

Post your favorite HTTT songs/performances:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9RDfpfxqZQ

# ¿ Jun 9, 2018 17:46

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

Ful Stop is one of Radiohead's best songs ever, both live and on the record. It's the one I was looking forward to on AMSP the most, and it didn't let me down. Burn The Witch would rock live (the live arrangement is basically the hardest rocking song they've written since the OK Computer days except maybe 2+2=5 and Bodysnatchers) except Thom seems to have trouble singing the melody properly. He ends up either attempting to sing it properly and ending up flat or just kind of resignedly wavers his voice around while singing the verses. Incidentally Bodysnatchers also tends to have the same issue.

Volte fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Jul 16, 2018

# ¿ Jul 16, 2018 15:22

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

If any album represents an orchestral epoch for the band, it's In Rainbows, not AMSP. The amount and impact of orchestration on AMSP always seems to be overblown. The two lead singles being orchestra-heavy might have something to do with it. AMSP only has five songs out of eleven with any orchestration at all: Burn the Witch, Daydreaming, Glass Eyes, The Numbers, and Tinker Tailor. The latter two use the orchestra for flourish in the second half of the song, and are otherwise standard Radiohead songs. To compare, In Rainbows has six songs out of ten with orchestration: Nude, All I Need, Faust Arp, Reckoner, House of Cards, Jigsaw Falling Into Place. And let's not forget that Weird Fishes was debuted as an orchestral number as well. Burn The Witch was also part of the In Rainbows sessions, and Thom specifically called it out as an orchestral tune in 2006.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUzmhztxWdc&t=20s

# ¿ Jan 14, 2019 15:33

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

Sir Lemming posted:

To be fair though, you can easily miss the orchestral parts in All I Need and House of Cards. They basically just fatten up the mix a little, they're not featured. And something like Jigsaw, which does have an obvious orchestral part, also has a lot of other stuff going on too, much more of what is typically considered a "classic" Radiohead sound, whereas "The Numbers"... not so much. It's more like 5 of the 11 songs are Faust Arp.

I'm not criticizing AMSP for it. Just saying.

I disagree about All I Need - I think the orchestra is the main reason that song sounds so huge. It sounds empty live by comparison. The "in your face" melodic strings on AMSP harken more to 60s and 70s soul music to me than movie soundtracks like some have been saying. Daydreaming and Glass Eyes are really the only songs that sound overtly theatrical to me. v :shobon:

v

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFdR2LLM3bY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFVHZFDs68w

# ¿ Jan 14, 2019 18:24

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

There are two do-it-yourself EPs embedded right in there:

AMSP I (28 mins):
Decks Dark
Desert Island Disk
Ful Stop
Identikit
Present Tense
True Love Waits

AMSP II (23 mins):
Burn the Witch
Daydreaming
Glass Eyes
The Numbers
Tinker Tailor

If you can strip out every song that has any orchestra and still end up with over half the album -- almost an LP's length in its own right -- it seems absurd to call it an orchestral album.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2019 23:43

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

Ballz posted:

I wonder if the FLAC is a transcode of the 192kbps leak.

Some of the files are shorter than the leaked ones (I assume to remove the copyrighted stuff like Bond themes and random jazz records), plus I'm sure they have high quality rips of the minidiscs on hand already from the OK Computer boxed set materials so I imagine they used those.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2019 16:07

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

Rollersnake posted:

I assume there's probably still a substantial amount of recordings from around this time that haven't leaked, considering Man of War and Meeting in the Aisle are nowhere to be found among any of these discs.

I don't think Man of War was actually recorded during the original OK Computer sessions - in the Meeting People Is Easy documentary, it's being recorded during one of the tours. In fact I would not be surprised if the released version of Man of War was recorded from scratch during the AMSP sessions. There's a story that they recorded and submitted it when they were asked to do a Bond soundtrack during AMSP, but it was rejected for not being newly written material (and thus not eligible for awards) so they did Spectre instead (which was then rejected for unknown reasons). Now that this leaked Lift version exists and can be compared to what was actually released, I also wouldn't be surprised if the OKNOTOK version of Lift was recorded around the same time. The drum sound in particular sounds very subdued compared to the OKC era, and it sounds more like the drum sound on The Numbers.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2019 04:35

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

I'm only on the fourth track and I've heard two samples that were used on 15 Step - the clapping sample in Traffic and the cheering children sample in Twist.

Twist feels like a sequel to Guess Again from TMB, down to the tempo and the dark piano chords, but with a lush quality that TMB lacked.

edit: I Am a Very Rude Person is great, probably my favourite so far. I'm pretty sure I've used a DAW where the default metronome is the intro of Not The News.

edit2: Apparently the cheering children sample wasn't used for 15 Step, they actually recorded children themselves for that one. Weird that it turned out so similar to that stock sample

Volte fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Jun 27, 2019

# ¿ Jun 27, 2019 17:26

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

It probably had its chance as a Radiohead song. AMSP was released under the company name "Dawn Chorus LLP" so the song was seemingly on his mind back then. According to an old interview its been around since 2009.

TVN on the 23th of March in 2009 posted:

AV: Thom, �cual es tu cancion favorita escrita por ti para Radiohead? (Thom: What is your favourite song you wrote for Radiohead?)

TY: Pause. Whatever... I'm finishing at the moment. Um, there's one called "Dawn Chorus" I�m trying to finish at the moment: that's really great... I think.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2019 22:15

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

Pirate Jet posted:

Anima is phenomenal. I�d go so far as to call it better than some Radiohead albums. Just absolutely stellar.

Yeah, for sure. Traffic, Dawn Chorus, and Rude Person are my favourites but the whole album flows really well. I was not hyped for ANIMA at all because I think TMB is good background music but not much else, but I've listened to it probably twenty times since it came out.

The short film is cool too. I expected it to just be some artfully filmed pretentious wandering or something but it's actually excellently choreographed and fun to watch.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2019 20:03

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

BigFactory posted:

Get Free is the best song they have a writing credit on.

The writing credits were never changed so presumably Lana won that battle.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2019 14:52

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

pzy posted:

Never forget the band has to pay The Hollies some money whenever they play Creep live

The Hollies didn't write the song originally, and bands don't pay royalties for live performances anyway. That's handled by the venues. But yeah, this guy gets something when they play it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HglphdXqMg

# ¿ Nov 14, 2019 17:37

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

I have a cut-down playlist of HTTT (46 mins) that I generally listen to instead of the real album, and a separate cut-down version of Com Lag (29 mins) that includes the tracks I took out of HTTT. There's nothing wrong with the original HTTT, but I like making custom playlists v :shobon:

# ¿ Nov 17, 2019 00:04

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

Fog was debuted in 2000 and sounded like the 2003 version. It seems like Thom just regretted fooling with a song that was already good and thought he made it worse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6YUqwnbKpQ

# ¿ Jan 24, 2020 03:27

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

It sounds like they did try to record Videotape the way it was done live but nobody was happy with it

Thom Yorke posted:

We were looking for something that had a real effect on us, an emotional impact, and that happened when we were doing Videotape and I was semi kicked out of the studio for being a negative influence. Stanley and I came back a bit worse for wear at about 11 in the evening and Jonny and Nigel had done this stuff to it that reduced us both to tears. It completely blew my mind. They�d stripped all the nonsense away that I�d been piling onto it, and what was left was this quite pure sentiment.

e:f,b

# ¿ Oct 2, 2020 15:00

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

BigFactory posted:

I wonder what kind of material they have for a box set? Demos would be cool but between amnesiac and all the b-sides I don’t know how many unreleased Kid A era songs there are.

I doubt they have many fully finished outtakes like I Promise but given how experimental the time was they probably have a lot of prototype stuff that would be interesting in the same way as the OK Computer cassette and minidiscs. I seem to remember Nigel saying around the OKNOTOK period they were lacking on unreleased stuff for OK Computer because they reused tapes and were generally stingy with storing unused things, but that they had a ton of stuff from Kid A and Amnesiac for when the time rolls around for that. Since they were both taken from the same sessions it would be hard to do a proper archival release for Kid A without also combining it with Amnesiac, since technically any unreleased material from one is also unreleased material from the other.

Personally I hope there are six more versions of Morning Bell.

# ¿ Oct 5, 2020 16:57

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

Jewmanji posted:

What are the songs with the greatest delta in quality between live performance and studio version (in either direction)?

Down Is The New Up and Go Slowly both got did dirty on the record compared to live.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOPe8DE-RKU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFi_9KFiyR8

# ¿ Oct 11, 2020 15:01

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

HD DAD posted:

If there�s one criticism I can give In Rainbows, it�s that the production was very clean and kinda sterile. Even Bodysnatchers sounds a little too �perfect�.

I think the production is great, I just think they stripped those two songs down a little too far. It's a little hard to say that about Go Slowly because the version on the record is really great, but man, the drums on the live version are so good. The studio recording of Down Is The New Up almost sounds like a demo compared to the version they did live though. It sounds very similar to the 2005 version that Thom recorded for From The Basement.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2020 06:01

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

SUNKOS posted:

I'll forever feel that way about Ful Stop and Identikit. The former was phenomenal live with the album version being very muted and not as magic, and Identikit still baffles me with the embarrassing singing over the synth solo contrasting the dull tone overall. Would adore good quality soundboard recordings of the original versions played on the King of Limbs tour, the album versions just had the life sucked out of them. Hopefully Cut a Smile makes it into a future album (feels like we'll be due one soon but who knows with Covid) and doesn't suffer the same fate because it's already perfect.

I like both versions of both songs. There's a great quality recording of Identikit 2012 on the Austin City Limits show

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRr7S9h5S4A&t=1700s

# ¿ Oct 16, 2020 16:58

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

SUNKOS posted:

Would be odd to reissue Kid A or Amnesiac a second time.

We already had the original reissues with all the b-sides, alternate takes and live songs and they're fantastic. Why would they reissue them a second time? If they had even more b-sides I think that they would have been included on the original reissues?

Then again it's 2021 and nothing makes sense so I won't rule out anything.

Those "Collectors Editions" were issued by EMI without the band's permission and have since been delisted. I doubt EMI would have had access or permission to put anything on them other than whatever had already been published by them and fell under existing contracts. They used to be up on Spotify and were deleted as soon as the band moved to XL Records. The Amnesiac B-sides are still available on Spotify since the actual singles (EPs, really) they're on are up there, but there's no band-sanctioned collection of all the released Amnesiac-era material in one place. Plus Nigel mentioned around the OKNOTOK release that there wasn't much left unreleased from OK Computer because they didn't retain much session material, but that he had a ton of stuff from the Kid A sessions.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2021 16:02

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

I just noticed the background music in that TikTok video is from the ending of the early live version of Paranoid Android from the OK Computer Minidiscs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjFqfOu_IPY&t=279s

I wonder if they're working on a live album of some kind

# ¿ Apr 3, 2021 16:24

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

The first tune actually was an unreleased Radiohead song that they've only played once (and Thom has played it solo a couple of times) in a new arrangement. I think it's in 11/8 (you can count it as 1 2 3 4 / 1 2 3 4 / 1 2 3)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBwTQntjhqQ

(Pyramid Song is actually just 4/4)

Volte fucked around with this message at 15:10 on May 23, 2021

# ¿ May 23, 2021 15:03

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

Paul or any of the Beatles could never read music, even to this day. Anything that needed to be transcribed for orchestration was done by George Martin. It's not uncommon at all for rock musicians playing their own material. Thom doesn't read music but Jonny does, given his background. Regardless, I think he has a good intuition about music theory, even if he wouldn't necessarily be able to explain his music academically.

# ¿ May 24, 2021 15:31

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

I still think music theory can be super helpful, even if you aren't fluent in reading and writing notation. I'm in a similar boat where I'd really like to be able to read music well, but without having a practical need for it, it's quite hard to internalize. A bit like trying to learn a new language alone in your bedroom without having anyone to speak to or get feedback from. There are a lot of YouTubers that break music theory down intuitively without relying on a lot of notation (Rick Beato and Adam Neely are a couple I like). Just watching them talk about various concepts and give examples at least lets you give names to different sounds and ideas so you can start to form an intuition beyond "hey that random thing I did sounds good".

# ¿ May 24, 2021 16:54

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

Anima is my favourite one but Eraser is a close second. TMB has never really grabbed me that much.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2021 22:45

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

SUNKOS posted:

They had that phone app a while back as well where you walk around some odd landscape. I don't recall many details now, but I think Jonny coded it? Could be confusing that with him coding their recording software, though.

It was created by a company called Universal Everything. I thought it was kind of interesting. As far as I'm aware, Jonny doesn't write code for Radiohead - he makes patches for Max which is a visual programming environment for audio processing. The stuttering guitar effect on the Go To Sleep guitar solo, and the choppy guitar solo effect in Identikit things like that would be stuff that Jonny made.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2021 21:27

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

It doesn't sound obviously touched up to me at all, vocally at least. Man Of War was 100% rerecorded in 2015 for the Bond film and Lift feels like it was totally rerecorded too (especially now that the actual OK Computer version is out there and is clearly totally different in both performance and production). If You Say The Word just feels like old Radiohead to me with Thom's Kid A voice. It's not like it's unprecedented since I Promise was a bona fide OK Computer outtake too.

Volte fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Sep 23, 2021

# ¿ Sep 23, 2021 22:59

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

Pretty sure Ed mentioned they didn't release it because they thought it had too much commercial potential and would probably become huge and turn into another Creep. I always suspected that the OKNOTOK version of Lift was probably recorded during the AMSP sessions, and after hearing the actual OK Computer version, I suspect it even more strongly now. I'm think they recorded Man Of War then as well for the Bond film (before finding out it was ineligible and writing Spectre instead). As for why they didn't release the actual OK Computer version on OKNOTOK, I have no idea. Maybe they had an AMSP version in the can that they wanted to use, or they thought the OKC version was too good to be a B-side.

Volte fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Oct 6, 2021

# ¿ Oct 6, 2021 19:15

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

AMSP is great and I like it even better if you stick Ill Wind and Spectre in their respective alphabetic positions.

# ¿ Oct 21, 2021 14:40

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

I hope we get an In Rainbows box set one day where we can hear whatever they tried to do with Burn The Witch back then.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2021 14:29

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 02:32

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

The Bonnaroo Videotape version was definitely anthemic but I think they made the right call for the album. It would have been too musically similar to Bodysnatchers and lacked the emotional element that ended up closing the album. The Bonnaroo version is officially "released" now on the Radiohead YouTube channel, at least, so it's no longer relegated to bootleg status. I'd rather have access to both versions than lose what we eventually got on the album. Funnily enough, the original demo version that Thom recorded in 2005 for From The Basement turned out to be pretty close to what ended up on the album. Sometimes the original idea was right after all.

I'll be contrary and say that I think Follow Me Around as it exists probably works better as a solo acoustic arrangement than a Radiohead song. It basically has a folk song structure, with just two main chords and alternating verse-chorus that could go on forever if he wrote enough lyrics. Even the full band version in Meeting People Is Easy is pretty simplistic for Radiohead, nothing that really sets it apart from your average garage band. If they wanted to make it really fit into an album they'd need to do more than just add bass and drums to the acoustic arrangement (and of course then people would be saying they ruined it).

As for full band versions, try the impromptu Atoms For Peace version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7o11GERmhs

# ¿ Nov 1, 2021 18:37

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > No Music Discussion > Radiothread - All I Want Is The Moon Upon a Stick

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