ferball415
Acrobat
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9. Parachutes
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Haha.
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9. Parachutes
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If you wanted to make a legit argument, it should be "yeah it's so lame that a song written at the beginning of Yorke's relationship is finally recorded and released after it ended, and this full circle journey is what makes it so poignant".
Kid A is an impressive work but I resent it for getting all the credit U2 never receives for Zooropa and Passengers
You don't think the decision to separate was heavily influenced by her health issues? Since she died so soon after the separation, I assumed the reason they separated was because she wanted to make it easier on them to move forward without her, but maybe I'm reading too much into it.Well if you know the timeline, the song was likely put on the album because of their divorce, not as a reaction to her dying, which didn't happen until 7 months after the album came out, therefore maybe a year after they decided to re-record and include it?
It ultimately makes the song more tragic in retrospect, but it's not as powerful to me as a fair number of other emotional RH tracks. I don't really care for Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own either, and that's LITERALLY written as a reaction to the death of Bono's father.
If you wanted to make a legit argument, it should be "yeah it's so lame that a song written at the beginning of Yorke's relationship is finally recorded and released after it ended, and this full circle journey is what makes it so poignant".
I think "started going down that path" is the operative phrase there. The commitment to the austere, dystopian soundscape on Kid A is complete and unflinching, which is what makes the record so unsettling. I see some of the arguments you are making, but I really don't hear anything of 90s U2 in Kid A.
The thing about those 90s U2 albums is that every daring thing they do is offset by something kitschy, which minimizes the overall effect. For every Lemon there's a Wanderer, whose stupid farting synthline makes it impossible to take seriously IMO.
Amnesiac is their least accessible album I'd argue. It took me a LONG time to become fond of it.
I've always liked Packt Like Sardines, Pyramid Song is obviously all-time Radiohead, and Life in a Glasshouse I've always dug too. The rest took me a long time to warm up to. For example, I know there's people here who love the studio version, but the gulf in quality between Spinning Plates' live version and the album version is cavernous imo.
I know you're not saying that austere = superior, and obviously U2 was more interested in showing both the pleasures and the downsides of technology and a world in media overload, reflected in both the lyrics and the music to accompany them. But even moreso they explore the discombobulation and confusion caused by it. For me, I find that to be more interesting than mere abstract dystopia. Regardless, with the exception of the admittedly kitchy Elvis Ate America and the more straightforward Miss Sarajevo, I find Passengers to be pretty austere on the surface level, even if the liner notes give the whole project a slight tongue-in-cheek veneer. It's that album I hear as more of a cousin to Kid A.
And again, Radiohead don't need to be taking pages out of U2's thematic or aesthetic book for there to be a connection. Because if you distill my suggestion down to the basics, it's that both bands were still looking into the face of the brave new world at the end of the millennium, and doing so by making forays into electronic music and distorting their own "typical" sound that the vast majority of their contemporaries were not. And considering how big U2 was at the time, I feel safe in saying their experimentation was pretty noticeable to their peers. I'll say it again: if you don't think Radiohead was paying attention to what Eno was doing in the 90s, you're insane. Even if what they wound up making themselves is closer to Eno & Bowie's Outside than it is to Zooropa or Passengers, it can't help but be a subconscious influence. And what I said originally was that Radiohead gets all the credit for going down this road, and U2 very little.
That'd be King Of Limbs, easily. I'm not saying Amnesiac is radio material, but KOL feels damn near impenetrable sometimes.
You And Whose Army, I Might Be Wrong, Knives Out, and Morning Bell/Amnesiac are all fairly accessible, I think.
Seriously, there's nothing on KOL anywhere near as accessible as those four or Life In A Glass House.
As for Spinning Plates...it's not accessible no matter how you slice it...but while I've always enjoyed the studio version, I finally heard the IMBW live version about a year ago for the first time, and it quickly became the definitive version for me. Hypnotic is the word I'd use to describe it.
Most of what we know about the questionable "ownership" of that album is somewhat apocryphal, and if we're going to draw on anything said in U2 by U2 I'd take it with a grain of salt. I think it's safe to say that Eno wrote and played a LOT more on Passengers than he had on any of their previous projects, and it would have been unfair to him to release it as a U2 album. It was his conceptual baby as well.
ENO: THE STORY BEHIND ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACKS 1
I honestly don't believe this was some big decision the band had to make, and I'd be surprised if it was ever seriously considered as an official U2 release.
From a 1995 interview with Bono:
"Brian has been a part of our set-up for a long time now, over the past ten years almost. We just wanted to make a record where he was in charge."
"We just wanted to be in Brian's band. He's an extraordinary man and he's had a very interesting part to play in our own development. It used to be said that a lot of English rock 'n' roll bands went to art school and we went to Brian. We'd always talked of doing something at some time, a collaboration."
"I think some people won't be into it, that's for sure. The guitars are very heavily treated and processed and don't sound like guitars. The people who are expecting a U2 album are going to be disappointed."
"Pavarotti's a father figure," Bono says. "He's an extraordinary man. He rang me and asked me to write a song and I said I didn't think that would be possible because we were working on these two records: this Passengers project and the next U2 record."
Sure doesn't sound like it was ever meant to be a U2 album.
Wow. My reaction here is I don't find TKOL inaccessible at all. Bloom is pretty expansive, Mr Magpie & Little By Little are pretty perfunctory rock tracks, and the second half is I would argue maybe Radiohead's strongest four-track run in their whole discography. I can't see anything about the record that would make it tough as an entry point. I certainly wouldn't direct someone to it first, but if you are reasonably familiar with the band - as I was when I first heard Amnesiac - then it's fine.
Contrastingly, You and Whose Army takes nearly two minutes to actually finally get going. I Might Be Wrong has a killer guitar line but is hampered by Thom's completely washed-out vocals. Knives Out is fine, Morning Bell is lovely but the Kid A version is more accessible.
The National Anthem & How to Disappear aren't as good as Right Place & Kid A