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.