Radiohead
and PJ Harvey produced some of the first albums I ever bought. To varying
degrees both musicians have stayed with me. I own just about every full album
each ever released and when both of these artists released a new album this
past month, I snapped them up.
It's
strange listening to bands for this long. Especially in the case of PJ Harvey,
the music contained within The Hope Six Demolition Project seems very much of
the same cloth as other music she's released. "A Line in the Sand"
sounds like a B-side from "Stories from the City, Stories from the
Sea." And yet, the music has deepened over time - matured - to grasp the
most obvious word. Harvey's vocals curl around the layered instruments, howl
when it's time to cut loose, press right up against the ground in a sinister
whisper. This is one of Harvey's more stripped-down albums. In comparison to
Let England Shake, the riffs are simple and blocky, the rhythms martial and
abrupt. Her first album, Dry, was like this - minus the studio craft
unavailable to a independent musician back in 1992. The guitar here has the
same loping, feral quality of that early album.
One big
change is PJ's perspective seems to have broadened over time. Dry was at once
jarringly personal and mythic - the kind of music so intense and claustrophobic
it could implode Stonehenge. Hope Six is looser but more traveled. It weaves in
vignettes of a walk through the National Mall and the street life of Kosovo and
Afghanistan. This is music drenched in terror. Apocalyptic imagery has always
existed in PJ Harvey's work, but a global accounting seems very near.
"This is how the world ends," Polly Jean sings, the music pounding
terrain already leveled by bombs and indifference.
Radiohead,
for me, still seems an unlikely survivor of the early 90s alternative moment.
Their most famous single (still?) "Creep," seemed one more
self-loathing, improbably catchy grunge anthem in a year lousy with them. To be
clear, I love "Creep," and listen to it without the slightest twinge
of embarrassment. I struggle to enjoy my favorite Pearl Jam singles so
effortlessly.
Perhaps
this British band's true talent was finding a sound in nearly every album that
captured the feeling of a certain moment without ever seeming captured by it.
OK Computer still sounds fresh and Kid A is perhaps more timely now then when
it was released. Their new album achieves a similar effect.
"Moon
Shaped Pool," is a great record. There's nothing here with same force as
"Karma Police," "Optimistic," or "Bodysnatchers,"
but the music finds new ways of mesmerizing, of grabbing hold. The first track,
"Burn the Witch" has a scorched earth title without ever pulling out
the flamethrowers. Staccato strings replace guitar pummelling, and Thom Yorke's
vocals hover in the seconds-away-from-full-panic-attack mode he basically
trademarked. The key difference here from the songs mentioned above - the song
never quite gives way to full release. The song builds, swells into a
shattering crisis, and pulls back. Instead of verse and chorus, Radiohead ride
waves of anxiety, ripples of dread. The song ends on a crumbling crescendo - as
if the song is dissolving beneath the flailing singer.
That's
what has me hooked at the moment - the fact that each song can be so many
things but retain a coherent statement. In less confident hands, these songs
would be a mess - but Radiohead has enough experience to hold the collage
together. There's something of Talk Talk in this album, songs that don't reject
convention so much as trade them in for new patterns.
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