← all Middle 8 videos
11:02 · 1,879 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- Pablo Honey gets a pass in the argument. It is generic rather than bad, and a debut that everything after improves on is not the worst thing a band can have.
▶ 00:00:18
- Radiohead start every album by deciding what they do not want to do next, which is why each one reads as a reaction to the last.
▶ 00:01:17
- After In Rainbows they wanted neither to just pick up instruments nor to sit at computers, and were looking for a balance of playing and programming.
▶ 00:01:38
- Nigel Godrich, after a stretch of DJing in Los Angeles, proposed using turntables and vinyl emulation software to manipulate their own playing.
▶ 00:01:53
- The working method was to sample their own jams and rebuild them electronically into loops, with Yorke adding melody and words afterwards, and a two-week experiment became six months and a whole record.
▶ 00:02:08
- The verdict is that the idea reads better than it plays. Loops that never surprise leave the tracks flat rather than building.
▶ 00:02:24
- It is their shortest album, eight tracks in 37 minutes, and the brevity is what saves it, since the average track already runs past four and a half minutes of looping.
▶ 00:03:17
- The two halves are distinct, the first organised around rhythm with glitchy sequencing and uneven time signatures, the second reaching back toward acoustic material for older fans.
▶ 00:03:49
- The comparison that hurts most is Kid A, which made electronics feel human, where this one leaves the humanity out of the instrumentation.
▶ 00:04:47
- The real defence is live. The band had to work backwards to learn their own parts and needed a second drummer for the rhythmically complex material, and the songs become far stronger in that setting.
▶ 00:07:01