And the two new songs are solid contributions to the canon: “Staircase” is the weaker of the two, a propulsive, almost dancey number that features a clever “stairstep” guitar riff but lacks a real melodic structure.
“Bloom” is one of the most electrifying reworkings of a ‘computerized’ studio RH song in over a decade, harkening all the way back to the days of the live rethinks of “Everything In Its Right Place” or “Like Spinning Plates” - a performance destined to be hailed as a highlight of Radiohead’s live career forever onward. (All three songs would improve markedly once taken out on the road in 2011-2012.)īut they remain fascinating documents (and possibly rare ones – how many times do you think the band is going to go to the trouble of performing the stillness-inducing “Codex” live?) nonetheless, and meanwhile the rest of the music works miraculously well. Magpie” are, at this early point in their live career, slightly half-baked. Meanwhile, the arrangements for “Separator” and “Good Morning Mr. But truthfully, some of the performances still sound a bit tentative: Yorke has immense trouble getting through “Little By Little” (despite, one imagines, several attempts at the song that were left on the cutting room floor), blowing lines, botching his phrasing, and generally disgracing the beguilingly breathy, delicate vocals of the album cut. Every single song in this session is a live band debut, so in historical terms alone it’s a must-own. The result is a session that feels qualitatively different than IR:FTB, yet less essential. (His musical contribution is immediately noticeable, and songs like “Bloom,” “Feral,” and “Little By Little” simply would not have been able to survive live performance without his rhythmic additions.) But that’s not all: also present is a six-piece brass section, adding their touches to “Codex,” “Bloom,” and (most strikingly) “The Daily Mail.” The band seems to have partially bought into that argument as well: this FTB session features, for the first time ever, the core band augmented by another full-time live performer in Portishead’s Clive Deamer, who doubles Phil Selway on percussion for every song. Perhaps that’s another way of saying that The King Of Limbs seemed uniquely ill-suited to standard live performance when it was first released.
Radiohead rare songs series#
In fact, it’s a bit of serendipity that the “From The Basement” series already existed prior to the release of The King Of Limbs, because it’s hard think of a format better suited to the music from this fascinating (and at times frustrating) piece of studio-shaped work. Give Radiohead credit: for all their relentless experimentation and quasi-mutagenic musical growth, they have the good sense to stick with ideas that work from a presentation perspective: Nigel Godrich has been producing since the days of “Talk Show Host,” Stanley Donwood has been handling the packaging since before 1995, and we now seem to be in for a happy sequence of “From The Basement” specials for as long as Radiohead continues to release new albums – a direct result of the wild artistic, commercial and critical success of the earlier In Rainbows: From The Basement session (see above). We also get (unique) solo takes on “These Are My Twisted Words” and “Reckoner” as well as the first performance of “I Froze Up” in a decade, along with the best of The Eraser.
“Give Up The Ghost” (perhaps surprisingly) is essentially the same song as would eventually show up on the album (including Yorke’s delightful use of an echoing sampler to create a canon effect with his voice), but “Separator” (here under its working title of “Mouse Dog Bird”) is first performed as a gorgeous acoustic piece of optimism.
A beautifully-recorded AUD, here is Yorke playing early versions of the songs that would go on to be rearranged for TKOL. As such, it’s a truly essential show for fans to own. This however, a solo show from early 2010 combining Eraser material with old classics, previews from The King Of Limbs, and as-yet-unreleased gems, must be considered within the Radiohead canon. There are those who feel The Eraser and its associated work to be little better than wankery there are others who think it should be considered in absolute unity with the rest of the band’s music. Thom Yorke’s “solo career” (or whatever we choose to call it) causes all sorts of complications in coming up with a definitive list of “Radiohead” shows.