When a band composes music filled with minor chords and dark lyrics and dissonant sounds people tend to characterize it as depressing or even suicidal. They mock what they don't understand. The music affects them darkly. It is not what they want or expect from their music. An aesthete by contrast appreciates being moved at all costs. If art bothers, confuses, invigorates in any direction or spurs something inner, some sort of inertia by means of the five senses, it is successful in its endeavor. Art moves and 'A Moon Shaped Pool,' is high art indeed.
If you are an aesthete you will appreciate the opening track, 'Burn the Witch.' It is an apt allusion to any witch hunt. It is not necessarily about immigration, illegal or otherwise, in the United States, but the general sense you get, of gathering around the bar or the office and complaining about others while avoiding eye contact, or responsibility for your own personal witch hunt, is apt. You live in a time of witch hunts, with a drumming, forward beat, jaunty in its momentum, blithe even. There is no time to think, only to burn the witch.
'Dreamers,' the second track is a dull warning about how impotent dreams are. You can spend your life dreaming the world is somehow bright and cheery, the way the music of major chords and bright lyrics portray life. However, if you view the world in such a way you have constricted your view to a narrow glimpse of images projected onto a wall, perhaps in your own mad cave, for the purpose of believing something that is simply not true. 'Dreamers' reminds you that life can be beautiful and sublime but only if viewed while awake, confronting the darkness with eyes wide open.
'Decks Dark,' asks if you have had enough of your former partner, (perhaps.) Are you over him who exposes the truth? Are you ready to go back to the cave or do you want to know it all? Certainly you can choose enlightenment but if you don't, the foray to knowledge and life will be just a laugh, and certainly the decks will be dark.
It's not as if Radiohead is so serious or so self involved as to believe their art, their music, can change the world, wake people, open you. Still, they offer ideas with mood and intensity that spirit you forward, tumbling into the abyss to arrive wherever you may, maybe even a moon shaped pool.
On 'Desert Island Disk' you are offered a respite from the weight of murky light. Yorke tells you he feels light. (You are sure he means it both ways.) The song is all positivity. If there is a Radiohead song you will want to include on your desert island disk it will be the hopeful one, the one that assures you no matter how much understanding you arrive at, no matter how much isolation it brings you from those who would run and hide from the light as if the suffocation would not give way to a higher plane, you know the truth. "Different types of love are possible."
It is possible this collection of songs dating back into the 90s are culled together for far more personal reasons. They may just be Yorke's epitaph punctuating the end of his own long term relationship. Perhaps the full stop period is an ending that still tastes like bad medicine. Perhaps you have experienced your own 'Ful Stop,' a partner who betrayed trust and threw it all away. She put the full stop on your relationship and Yorke has a revelation for her, "the truth will mess you up."
When love turns cold in the heart of someone with 'Glass Eyes,' it can only sound as exquisite as this when Radiohead composes it, (with the help of an accomplished string section.) You are familiar with this setting, the dark, angry, complicated lyrics with the candied falsetto floating over the top of it all. In many ways it does not matter to you what the singer croons. On the other hand you know the message will sink in and take you later by surprise. You can't help recalling that former partner with the glass eyes. All the warmth you once knew with her turned icy cold. Icy fucking cold.
'Identikit,' continues the post mortem. It is a bitterly dissonant song musically full of confusion but with a melody you recognize at once. It is the melody of grief, of the aftermath. Broken hearts do make it rain and the tears you shed are personal and for your kind. In so many ways 'A Moon Shaped Pool,' conjures the pain social media seems to add to breakups. 'Identikit,' may be the acidic answer to the pain of seeing and hearing. You would rather see your former lover as just another anyone, a common patchwork identikit of anyone, anyone at all, not someone special who knew, who knew...
L'est you ever think Radiohead is in anything short of all that came before, 'The Numbers,' proves their discography is the culmination of all that came before. It feels like the continuation of the Beatles and Led Zeppelin and Neil Young. The Numbers is pure message. The future is inside us. We are of the earth. Open on all channels. One day at a time. We call upon the people. People have the power. The numbers don't decide. There's much more. You listen and you fall in love with hope and truth all over again because amidst all this heartbreak you know, everything out there is in here. Wonder.
'Present Tense,' is a staggering attempt at empathy. Yorke puts himself in her shoes and identifies through the pain with how lost one can be when confronted with so much growth.
On 'Tinker Tailor Solder Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief,' you feel like tagging her. She is it. You've said your peace. The pain comes and goes, ebbs and flows, and if you are suspicious, if you are paranoid, you must be it. You can't help but want to tag her again to rid yourself of this pain.
'True Love Waits,' may have been about chastity rings when it was conceived 20+ years ago but here, where it belongs on a Moon Shaped Pool, it becomes the simple cry it is. It is a promise that can't be kept of course, and a plea. "Don't leave." You can't help but feel this way in the wake as the water crests you under. You can know the end was inevitable. You can be at peace with the outcome but you will still have those moments when you remember how good it was or more importantly how good it could have been, how good it still could be if somehow it all came back together in a perfect way, (because it would take a perfect way after all this, right?) "Don't leave," Yorke intones. "Don't leave. The burden of loss and sadness in unmistakable. Love hurts. And maybe true love is a juvenile emotion. It seems that way when you try so hard, when your heart is as pure as the chastity of a young supplicant, When you have no control and can't keep what you love. "Don't leave," you plead,
'A Moon Shaped Pool' is not easily defined. It is not this kind of record or that kind of record. It is a long way from the sets of stellar pop songs The Bends and Pablo Honey were. It is not quite OK Computer, Kid A or Amnesiac in their knowable conceptual themes. It is more, really. It is all of those things and In Rainbows too, but with greater maturity and perhaps even complexity, (you think.) By the way, Street Spirit would fit like a jigsaw puzzle on this record.
As for the album art, the moon shaped pool is actually a face, a specter or apparition, appearing in an aftermath of confusion. Maybe it's Yorke's face separated out by so many shades leaving only his right eye and what looks like a sprawling nose and a puff of smoke coming from his mouth. Like so much of Radiohead's music this collection represents a person alive and at odds with his environment, (therapy) thereby achieving an uncommon, prescient harmony.
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