TKOL is very underrated, "Little by Little" and "Codex" are gorgeous edit: as well as "Give Up the Ghost" and "Separator." Goddamn I love this album
My fave songs on the record as well... but it's also only 8 tracks and 3 of them are forgettable imo ("feral", "separator" and "mr magpie"). Just doesn't have the consistent streak of hard hitting tracks that their prior 4 or 5 albums had.
I'll grant you "Feral" (though I think it works in context--most of that album is better taken as part of a whole, which I'd count as one of its strengths) but "Magpie" and "Separator" are fantastic.
"Separator" is the highlight of the album for me, albeit still not one of their top 10 songs or anything.
I've said this at least once before but TKOL is really very respectable artistically even if I'm often left wanting while listening to it. That it's a short album is the biggest thing for me and I don't like a track or two. But the sounds and tones they made on it are very very inspired and really different than their "core" sound. Bloom is the standout.
That's a fair take. I find the negative response to it kind of puzzling, personally. But then I'm very lukewarm on AMSP and people seem to love it, so what do I know?
I suppose I can understand someone loving TKOL far more than I do, but I'm truly puzzled by the hardcore fans who were down on AMSP. And I think it's been long enough now that my love for AMSP isn't at all based on the novelty or surprise of it coming out without warning (hopefully). I really do see it as the darker companion to IR that's 95% as good.
The word I keep coming back to is stagnant--the vocal melodies and the instrumentation all kind of hover in one register without a lot of motion, yet with just enough to preclude any kind of hypnotic or droning effect. The strings, while obviously well done, feel more sterilizing than emotional to me. The album is not unenjoyable--there are a lot of nice moments, and I'll continue to revisit it--but overall it strikes me as a lot of dressing on a relatively weak batch of compositions. All just my opinion, of course. But in my mind this is nowhere near In Rainbows-level good--I rank it above The Bends and Pablo Honey and nothing else.
TKOL has always fallen somewhere in the middle of their discography for me. However, TKOL: Live From The Basement is just beautiful.
Yep. People always complain about how TKOL is too short, but it feels like the perfect length to me. The way it starts so jittery and claustrophobic and eventually moves into the freedom of "Separator" never fails to move me. I think they do exactly what they wanted to do on that album.
Idk they were cool at first but they lost their magic. I still like TKOL and own the newspaper album vinyl. Not trying to dirt on the record. OKC through In Rainbows is just a hell of a run and I disagreed when people said TKOL was upper tier for them. In the scope of most music, most bands couldn't pull off Mr Magpie. In terms of Radiohead they've written better music in their sleep haha.
Maybe. Or even cut out 2-3 songs (though I don't think we'll find much agreement on which should go, so maybe not) and done the same. It just doesn't have the scope and depth to compete with any of their top-tier LPs, to me. It was a cool experiment, in a sense, but records like AMSP and IR sound like the songwriting was taken 10x more seriously.