BUT THAT VOICE

The new Radiohead album A Moon Shaped Pool is music to soothe wounded adult souls. Each of its eleven songs is a spacey, porous confection. Instrumental lines swirl gently around one another, and the vocals float across the top.

The effort would be easy to dismiss but for singer Thom Yorke’s voice, which is celestially beautiful. It’s inspired much bad prose, and might again right now. It doesn’t appeal directly, the way that Joni Mitchell’s and John Lennon’s voices do. When I hear those artists I feel that I’m hearing them themselves, speaking to me. Yorke’s voice, instead, impresses with its elusiveness, its quicksilver agility, the way it slides across and then cuts through a song, descends into a wail and then emerges in a shout. It can feel like an instrument that’s more than human, operating at unexplored registers and stirring up dormant emotions, like birdsong or violin.

The beauty of Yorke’s voice is the unmaking of this album. These songs aren’t complex dramatically – they don’t take anything as their subject – so his singing is reduced to gorgeous ornament. Yorke is an accomplished songwriter and, when left to his own devices, without the band and with minimal accompaniment, can deliver pop songs with astonishing immediacy. But on this album that voice serves no end.

Artwork courtesy of Stanley Donwood and Radiohead.

June 13, 2016 by Nalina Moses

There is no finer delivery system for pleasure than a good pop song. Sadly, this power is left mostly unexploited in Massive Attack’s multi-media concert/collaboration with documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis at the Armory. The Drill Hall is majestically transformed, with a small stage for the musicians at the center, wrapped with a giant U-shaped field of video screens. Curtis’ film, which traces, compellingly, western social culture from the 1960’s to the present by laying critical speech and text over archival news footage, flickers across them simultaneously. And Massive Attack becomes, for the evening, a cover band, performing songs relevant to moments in the film’s narration, most of them written by other artists. In following along so literally the band don’t do justice to their own dense, textured, enveloping sound, or to the film’s political verve. The show becomes another pop video, serving up music alongside imagery without engaging it incisively.

The film gives moments of astounding political clarity, as when clips from Jane Fonda’s iconic exercise tape, unnervingly glossy, illustrate how American culture collapsed in the 1980’s from shaping the world to shaping its body. There are moments of pop magic too, like when the growling vocals to Karmacona start up and the band breaks into its signature hypnotic torrents. But nothing is as enthusiastically received as their cover of Sugar Sugar, which is meant to illustrate the enforced jolliness of postwar, pre-Beatles pop culture. The accompanying film shows us minstrel shows, dog shows, dance contests, and other inanities, but we don’t feel them ironically; instead we surrender to the sweet, stupid power of the song. Throughout the 90-minute show the music and film move at different paces, overlapping at moments literally but rarely viscerally. What if the sonic and visual forces, both potent, were fully fused, the entire show choreographed thematically with original music from the band, so that it became charged with the sting of the film’s righteous, deeply troubling politics? We would accept both, ecstatically.

Image courtesy of Massive Attack.

September 29, 2013 by Nalina Moses