I'm Going Radiohead Crazy: Get Your B-Sides Here + Take Two Update

You know that period of time after you see a band live where basically all you listen to is their stuff? Yeah, that happens to me really badly whenever I see a show. It's happened for The Hives, Interpol, Daphne Loves Derby, and most recently Radiohead. Last year, right after the release of In Rainbows, I tracked down a ton of Radiohead b-sides over at The Good, the Bad, & the Unknown. I think in light of my recent Radiohead binge I'd like to point people on over there to listen to the two b-side "albums" he made over there: Caisson Disease and Photographic Memory. My favorite things about his b-side collections are that the titles that are inverses of actual releases (e.g. Photographic Memory instead of Amnesiac) and the awesome custom album covers. Check them out, these tracks are just fantastic and are really hard to track down one by one.

And in the spirit of there being some "unofficial" albums of b-sides, I'll update my Take Two from yesterday.


Caisson Disease

"Maquiladora" - That guitar riff, man does that just epitomize the sound of the 90s to me. Hearing Yorke wailing over those dueling guitars is magnificent. I find myself wondering why some of these tracks didn't make the album, but then I remember that the albums are pretty much perfectly sequenced and pared down so there's no filler. These songs work as a b-side collection, but I wouldn't ever really want one of them messing up the images I have of the albums as they are.

"Coke Babies" - That fuzzed out ending is pretty sweet, and I love the semi-floating feeling of the guitar and the drums up until the fuzzing of the chorus. For a gruesome song title, its a pretty sweet sounding track, which is all the more sinister. Considering the amount of material Radiohead releases and the number of songs they hold over from session to session, they really do have an amazing back catalogue of b-sides from over the years. To be able to get multiple collections out of the b-sides is intense, especially when they form albums that dwarf other bands' actual recording output in terms of quality.


Photographic Memory

"Lull" - The shortest song I put on the whole list of Radiohead songs, but I love the guitar work here. All of these songs are culled from different sessions so it's a little hard to place these thematically with one record or another. Caisson is from The Bends-era, and Photographic Memory is from Ok Computer until after Amnesiac, so I'm not really sure where to place this song amongst the records, but I really like it on its own. After a couple more re-listens, the drums are fantastic as well. Short, sweet, simple, altogether not really the kind of track that Radiohead releases, but still awesome. It shows how well they'd do if they were just playing straightforward rock, but we know they're capable of much, much more.

"Talk Show Host" - In a list of my favorite songs of all time it's a all-out-brawl between this song and "2+2=5" for the Radiohead slot (I limit myself to one song per artist). The atmosphere, the guitar, the vocals, the lyrics, the Romeo + Juliet connection, everything just fits for me. The first time I listened to the song outside the film, my jaw dropped I was in so much awe of its beauty.


Okay, now I'm going to stop with the Radiohead overload and try to write something else for once. Just give me a few days or something.

Take Two: Radiohead

A while ago I was wondering what it would be like to boil down the albums of an entire career into just a few songs. Beyond that, what it would be like to only be able to choose a few songs off each album, making a different kind of "greatest hits" collection. Most of the time you like some albums in a discography more than others and would choose more tracks from there, but that's not the case with these posts.

I'm going to go back into some of my favorite artists who have released four or more albums, and pick two favorite tracks from each album to list. I'm not looking for "greatest" song or big hits, I'm just picking the songs I like the most off of each record. It's especially hard to do because you end up with songs that would be on the list if you weren't limiting yourself to only two songs per album.


Pablo Honey
"Creep" - Just because they hated the touring after their one mainstream hit doesn't mean it isn't a great song. Hell, it's an iconic guitar entrance at the chorus.

"Anyone Can Play Guitar" - Their debut is certainly their weakest album (there aren't too many worthwhile modern bands you can say that about...), but I still find myself coming back to this song when I'm in a Radiohead groove.


The Bends
"Fake Plastic Trees" - I'm a sucker for Thom Yorke beginning a song with just his voice and acoustic guitar.

"My Iron Lung" - One of my favorite opening riffs of any song, ever. People say that this album is what Radiohead would sound like if they didn't go down the creative rabbit hole of Ok Computer, but I'd disagree a little bit. This is a huge step forward from Pablo Honey and was probably just as much of a departure as any of their other albums. They hated the late recognition "Creep" got them and just completely turned away from that attitude.


Ok Computer
"Paranoid Android" - The epic, operatic centerpiece of the album to me. The legend goes that the band stayed up an entire night orchestrating all the instrumentation for the song, and then Thom Yorke heard it and laid down the vocals in one take. The lyrics in the breakdown (especially "kicking, screaming, Gucci little piggy") are some of the best I've ever heard.

"Exit Music (For A Film)" - Originally composed for the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack in the mid 90s (I can hear the play's influence a little bit in the verses), it shows off one of my favorite aspects of Radiohead in the shift from just acoustic guitar and airy noises to a bellowing bass shift that thunders through the track.


Kid A
"Kid A" - I keep picking some soft songs off these records, but damn if Radiohead doesn't do both extremes fantastically and blend them together too. This is probably my 2nd favorite record, and I love the masked vocals so much. Deciphering the words coming out of Yorke's mouth surrounded by the lush sonic landscape is simply beautiful.

"The National Anthem" - How can this cacophany immediately follow the title track on Kid A. What balls, Radiohead! My favorite softer song is followed immediately by their most destructive rocking, but then the horn section comes in. It's like rock mixed with experimental jazz, and then everything cuts out to let Yorke say his piece.


Amnesiac
"Like Spinning Plates" - There's no hiding that this is my least favorite Radiohead album after Pablo Honey, and there are songs off Ok Computer and Hail to the Thief that would bump these two songs off, but they're still great tracks. This track debuts the opening effect that went on to open another great track on Hail to The Thief ("The Gloaming"), and to my mind it kind of represents the sound of spinning plates pretty well. It's a hyper-realistic experience to listen to Radiohead, espeically in a dark setting and a contemplative mood. These are records that make me want to bring back the days of just putting on some music and sitting down with friends, or alone, to listen through it.

"I Might Be Wrong" - This is definitely one of the tracks that separates Amnesiac as something more than a b-sides album to the Kid A sessions. Its got a great backing beat and guitar riff, and the style just feels all its own. That's one thing that always amazes me about the band: their ability to write songs and keep them gestating over multiple sessions, but still have a stylistically cohesive album that sounds as though it was all written at the same time.


Hail to the Thief
"2+2=5" - This is still probably my favorite Radiohead song of all time. I love the guitar being plugged in at the start, the incidental dialogue, the opening riff, the frenetic, gasping-for-breath ending, the otherworldly post-apocalyptic 1984 feeling it instills right from the get-go. This song convinced me to buy into Radiohead as a band, and for that it remains my favorite.

"There There" - Again I choose contrasting songs, this with a much more mellow track, but there's still a feeling of claustraphobia, trapped anger, some emotion waiting just beneath the surface. This whole album feels very alive to me, like its a time capsule for that time in 2003. It's one of those records I can throw on and feel transported to the past.


In Rainbows
"All I Need" - The bass and piano make this song for me. This entire song feels effortless to me, but it's so well crafted and executed. It may have taken four years between albums for the band, but man was In Rainbows worth the wait.

"Reckoner" - I haven't really mentioned Johnny Greenwood a lot and have been mostly praising Thom Yorke, but good lord do I love the little guitar bits here. The things that impress me most about the guitars in Radiohead's work is how subtle it can be, and the many uses they've found for a guitar. They don't use the traditional rock instruments in the same way that all other bands do; they're able to use a guitar to fill gaps instead of set the tone.


So there you have it, my inagural Take Two post. I'll be putting up another one of these later in the week for another artist, I've just got to choose from among the four album plus contenders.

Radiohead Rule Outside Lands (+10 Songs They Didn't Play)

I considered holding off on writing about Radiohead's set on Friday night until after the first Outside Lands Music Festival ended on Sunday night, but the fact of the matter is that there is nothing that can top that single performance. Yes, the promoters of Outside Lands have some serious traffic congestion and concert layout issues to address in Golden Gate Park if they want to hold a festival like this ever again, seeing as how they tried to have narrow avenues for 10-20 thousand people to move quickly from band to band (many resorted to knocking down fences and walking through the park). Yes, the sound went out completely, twice during Radiohead's set (in the middle of "Airbag" and "All I Need"), but the performance was still flawless. I've waited years to see Radiohead live, and when the Outside Lands lineup was announced in the spring I was waiting on pins and needles until Friday night. I saw only a masterful performance, I can ignore any small glitches or hiccups along the way.

My dad and I frequently talk about the merits of music from his generation compared to mine. To be honest, I find that people claiming there was no good music after a certain calendar year to be completely and total idiots. Someone that says nothing after 1969 or 1979 was worth anything in music can be silenced with the idea that nothing good in music came after 1900, or after orchestra and symphony music stopped being the biggest music "scene." Those time limiting arguments are useless, what remains is that there are important musicians and bands for every generation. However you want to put it, band like the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin and the like are creative forces that outlive their time period. When I end up in a conversation about what band from my generation will live on, I always end up thinking of Radiohead.

There are bands that I personally like better than Radiohead, and there are albums and songs I connect to better than Radiohead's catalogue, and by that extension like better, but no other band in my experience has been more consistently incredible than the five men from Oxfordshire. They've mastered the art of deconstructing who they are as a band and building something new and fantastic every time. When I hear bands release new material they wrote in old recording sessions, I usually think it's of lesser quality. Where Radiohead is concerned, they hone songs over multiple album recording sessions, preparing it until it's just right in their minds, and then put it on a record where it fits right in as though its brand new.

The band might not play Pablo Honey live much anymore, and its pretty much their only album that rests below the stratosphere as far as quality is concerned, but I just can't name any other band that hasn't made a bad album. You can debate personal favorites all you want, but Radiohead is the most consistent band in the world right now. They are this generation's Beatles, thankfully without the mania.

It's at this point that I realize I haven't even talked about their set yet. They played a lot off of In Rainbows, which had only the small drawback of them not getting to play many songs off Hail to the Thief. Otherwise, they played a pretty perfect set. After the show on our ride back, I made a playlist of songs they didn't play in their set that I'd like to hear, and it was exactly the length of their set. There are no other bands of our time that can double a set list and maintain their quality in the way Radiohead can. It's astounding. Songs sprinkled in from their entire discography and were met by roars of applause at every turn. While their albums are so disparate, they seem to come together and complement each other perfectly when mixed together in a live set.


Their light show on this tour is just incredible. They performed surrounded in what seemed like a prison cell of fluorescent lights that turned all different colors throughout the set. When rain imagery was necessary, little blue light streaked down the bulbs to imitate rain, during "Fake Plastic Trees" they turned green, during "The National Anthem" they turned red, white, and blue. The set was an all-engrossing experience for sight and sound. The two giant screens on either side of the stage were fixed camera perspectives from places like their piano, the bass drum, Thom Yorke's microphone, and gave an other-worldly feel to the performance.

They mixed songs that bled into each other perfectly, hitting loud highs with "Airbag" or "Bodysnatchers" and diving low with thumping beats on "Videotape" "Idioteque" and "Everything in Its Right Place." It was especially wonderful to hear "Talk Show Host," one of my personal favorites from the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack. I was more and more excited every time a song started and I recognized that I was actually seeing the band play it live with sensory overload courtesy of the lights. I've been to concerts and loved them before, but this was one time where the experience of the live setting outweighed the daunting quality of the music itself.

It took a while to get to Golden Gate Park, even longer to get situated for Radiohead, and even longer to get back out of the park to our car after the show. It was a completely overpriced ticket considering how poorly handled the festival seemed to be by the promoters, and the layout of the fields was far too small for the number of people that needed to move freely around the park. But in light of the two hours dropped on the Bay Area by Radiohead, none of those complaints matter, I'm nothing but ecstatically happy about that performance. I now will be able to say I have seen the greatest band of my generation, and I'll do it with a huge smile of my face remembering just how great it was.


Set List:
15 Step
Reckoner
Airbag
There There
All I Need
Nude
Talk Show Host
National Anthem
The Gloaming
Videotape
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
Idioteque
Karma Police
Jigsaw Falling Into Place
Just
Exit Music (For A Film)
Bodysnatchers
Encore:
Pyramid Song
You and Whose Army?
Paranoid Android
Fake Plastic Trees
Everything In Its Right Place



And just for kicks, here are the 10 best songs they didn't play on Friday night:

"The Bends" - They played some straight up rockers off of In Rainbows, but before they went down the rabbit hole, this was as hard rock as they got for me.

"My Iron Lung" - I waited and waited for this song's intro to begin in the dark, but it never came.

"Electioneering" - One of my favorites from OK Computer.

"Kid A" - Oh how I wanted to hear those little intro piano sounds, followed by miraculous electric blips and Yorke's tweaked out vocal track.

"2+2=5" - The first Radiohead track I really remember knowing was them, as well as the first album I purchased. It's a longtime personal favorite, and the 1984 reference and feel of the entirely of HtTT strikes a chord with me.

"Sit Down, Stand Up" - They didn't really have time for a lot of HtTT material, but man would it have been cool to see.

"Backdrifts" - The beginning swooshing electronic sounds could've gone with another track from the album, "The Gloaming." To me they sort of play as the good/evil electronic sounds on the album, with "Gloaming" sounding menacing but "Backdrifts" inviting.

"Go To Sleep" - It could've worked right in to the part in their set with "Karma Police" and "Jigsaw" because they had the acoustic guitar going.

"Where I End and You Begin" - I love this album so much, it's a pity they didn't play more of it, but when you have so much great material there's no way they could play everything.

"House of Cards" - The only song from In Rainbows I wanted to hear that they didn't play.

Honorable Mention: "Creep" - You know they're not playing it, but why not put it down at the bottom of the wishlist?


Well, there you have it. Radiohead in San Francisco. I guess I'll just have to desperately try to see them again in hopes of hearing some of these 10.

Finally a Festival for me...

I hate summer festival shows for the specific reason that I can never attend any of them. I used to go to BFD, a festival in Mountain View, CA. I went from 7th grade until my junior year of high school, and missed out on the tradition my senior year. I remember going specifically to see New Found Glory, one of my favorite bands in 7th grade, and I just kept going to the festival as an end-of-year habit. I did get introduced to Interpol, Death Cab For Cutie, and others at various festivals, and I got to see great sets by A.F.I., Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and others over the years.

All the other festivals have been too far away or at unfortunate times. Coachella is too far south in CA, and now I live in Evanston, IL when it happens. Bonaroo and Lollapalooza are both when I'm back in CA for the summer, and Bamboozle and Bamboozle Left are too far away at at weird times. Last year San Francisco got its own festival with some of my favorite indie bands, the Treasure Island Music Fesitval, which was the weekend I left for college so I couldn't go.


Finally it has just been announced that the Bay Area is getting another summer festival: Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival. This is just a Bay Area Festival, so we're probably going to get some lame, Bridge School Concert reject acts, right? WRONG, they landed just about the biggest band I've been waiting to see: Radiohead.

They've also got Tom Petty, Beck, Wilco, Ben Harper, Regina Spektor, and tiny little band Rupa & the April Fishes, who I saw back in September at a charity show for about thirty people. I'm about 90% sure that I'm going, because I desperately do not want to miss this chance to see Radiohead. I've been listening to a lot of their music lately, and I think I'm going to start trying to do retrospectives on bands, maybe starting with those boys from Oxfordshire.

I Read the News Today...

Radiohead's new album In Rainbows became available to download today. I previously stated that while listening to the live version I didn't think the album was "album of the year" worthy, but after listening to it at least five times straight through today, I stand completely corrected. It's coherent, it's mystical, it's a huge trip, and I will definately be paying a little bit of money now that I've heard it.

I've seen a bunch of blogs posting up songs from the album...or the entire album itself. Apparently those guys didn't get the memo that the album is entirely, 100% free to those that don't want to pay a cent for it. You can go buy it from the site here.

So far my favorites are "15 Step", "Bodysnatchers", "Reckoner", and "Jigsaw Falling Into Place". The rest of the tracks are great too, and I think it does a great job of blending thematically even though the songs were written over a long period of time. I hope this release style is successful, because I'd really like to see it done in the future by other bands, because it skirts around the whole marketing hype a record company goes through. The record succeeds or fails based on its own merits, not on the marketing ability of a record label or interest in a particular band doing well for the company.

The In Rainbows Revolution

Everyone reading music news on the web knows that Radiohead has announced the release date, title, and release format of their 7th album. It's called In Rainbows, it comes out on Tuesday the 10th of October, which is just a few days.

Now, the songs that are on the album aren't exactly a collection of brand new material. In fact, most of it is material that dates back to the Amnesiac/Kid A sessions or the OK Computer sessions. I'm not really sure how to feel about that, but considering the live versions of almost all the songs have been available for over a year now, I know the songs still sound great. The studio versions are bound to sound a little bit different, but I still think it will be great. Not "Album of the Year" great, but yet another fantastic addition to the Radiohead catalog.

What I find more interesting than the fact that we already know all of the songs on the album is how the band is choosing to release it. The album is currently only available to order on one website, which you can find here. As most of the internet has already said, you choose what you pay for the album, provided it does not exceed £100.

Radiohead has always been pretty much at the forefront of putting up their middle fingers at the recording industry ever since "Creep" became a hit. They've spent a little more than ten years diving down an artistic rabbit hole over the course of their career, and enough fans followed them through that process to make sure that for the rest of their lives they will be able to do things their own way. This surprise announcement is the strangest thing they've done yet, but there is talk that they will sign a one album deal so that a record company can cash in with a "proper" release of the record.

You can find almost all of the songs across the two discs everywhere on the net, so go listen to some of the live versions. I think I'm going to try downloading the album for free (it's not really free, there's a transaction fee of $1.00, so go figure), and then deciding whether or not to pay a little more money after I listen to it. I think that's a good way of releasing albums in the future, because at least then people could decide which bands survive by paying money for the good ones to keep making music. Of course we could end up with a bunch of least common denominator bands because of the buying power of Middle America, but who knows...

Starry, Starry Night

Tonight was the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. It was a really great spectacle, and it still has a few nights where there will be a lot of meteors streaking across the sky, so I suggest you get out and see them at a spot without a lot of light around about 11. And in honor of the time spent staring up at the night sky, here are some great songs having to do with or about stars:


My sophomore English teacher got me really into early 90s indie rock, especially Built to Spill. I had already been listening to Pavement, but these guys, the Silver Jews, and Yo La Tengo’s presence in my musical tastes are a direct result of that guy. This was the first BTS song that really hooked me, and rightly so. It’s got a great melody, and Marsch’s lyrics are childish (referring to the Big Dipper as a “brontosaurus laying on its side up in the sky”) and tender at the same time.

Built to Spill – Big Dipper


I definitely feel that Echo & the Bunnymen don’t get the respect they deserve for the great records they made back in the 80s. The Smiths get all the critical praise, The Cure got the album sales, but Echo was always my favorite of those three. This song comes from their first album, Crocodiles, which was definitely their most raw sounding, before they started messing around with more instrumentation in the studio. I don’t think this is one of their absolute best, but I still really like it. Echo is one of my favorite bands, so you’ll definitely see more of their stuff on here in the coming weeks.

Echo & the Bunnymen – Stars are Stars


Ok, so this only has a little bit to do with stars, but it’s such an awesome song that because the word is in the title I have an excuse to post it. Off of Radiohead’s second album The Bends, the entire album was like the band waving goodbye to the traditional rock music they were expected by fans and labels alike to keep making for the rest of their careers following the success of “Creep.” As we all know, they went down the rabbit hole of creativity to incredible artistic success, but the amazing thing here is that they were equally adept if not more impressive in their farewell to more traditional alternative rock music.

Radiohead – Black Star




In movie news, Rush Hour 3 topped the box office with a weekend total of just over $50 million.


However, I’ve read in a few different places that the total has been inflated a bit so the movie could get a little press out of opening over fifty mil. Here’s one movie-goer that hopes the actuals turn out a bit lower. It’s the summer of threequels to be sure, and not all of them have been good, but I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that the only person in America that really needed this movie was Chris Tucker.


UPDATE: Final numbers put it at 49.1 mil, which is still way too much, but at least it's not 50. Also check out a great post on /film here about how the opening is being received by the media. It's a great comparison to M:i:3, and a wonderful display of how Brett Ratner for some reason is getting cut more slack with all the crap in his back catalogue than Tom Cruise is with all of the great performances in his career.