I don’t want to go on for too long about ‘Identikit’
because I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop. So let’s just talk briefly about
the one guitar on the side running through the song, mostly picking up
steam in the second half. It’s not an angry part, but it follows the trajectory
of repressed anger faithfully. Short, sudden jolts of expression peek out from
time to time, before the protagonist retracts and retreats, aware that it’s not
always a smart idea to be too animated in public. Such as when said protagonist
is standing in a queue or in an overcrowded train compartment. She lets out
little sighs and other sounds of disapproval every time she gets nudged in the
side or smacked in the jaw by a stray arm. Then someone cuts the line so she
starts off, measured and composed and rational and balanced and logical. She’s keeping it together — just about.
But then, when that one asshole steps on her foot,
that’s when shit hits the ceiling. Which is the last 30 seconds of the song:
the guitar solo. It’s an outburst, bursting at the seams with rage and fury and
yet surprisingly composed and articulate. It has to be ‘Identikit’. I’ll get to
the ‘it’ in a while.
--
I’m sick of A
Moon Shaped Pool — I swear. Each time ‘Burn The Witch’ starts off with its
ratatatting strings — played with a guitar pick, because where’s the fun
otherwise? — I feel this urge to shove a pair of tweezers into my ear and pull
out the drum. But before we get ahead of ourselves, I feel I should clarify
that the fault, as with most things, is entirely mine, and not the music’s. This
is an album that, for the past four months and nine days, has been an
inextractable (not a word, but it means “that which cannot be extracted”) part
of my physical existence.
I have abused the record to a worrying degree. I’ve
heard it in autos, rickshaws, Olas, Ubers (which I recently started using
because they let me pay in cash now), aeroplanes (because I’m rich), trains
(because I’m not rich), on motorcycles and scooters, on bicycles, tricycles,
and unicycles — while driving too, until Delhi’s finest suspended my license
for being 2 km over the speed limit. And while walking. And sitting/lying down.
I’ve actually literally without exaggeration run
through two sets of earphones. One is an Apple and it’s all worn out now, but
it still sort of works. The previous ones were these really cool Sennheiser
earphones that I had to cremate because they packed up, and now I’ve bought a
new pair just like those (because their price dropped). (I think even the MP3
files I have have started crackling a bit.) Further, it may sound like a giant
coincidence (but it’s not) but, in addition to the earphones, I’ve also had to
get a new phone and a new laptop.
It’s understandable then that I don’t want to see its
face again. Just the thought of it makes me wince. These days, after four long
months, I sometimes try to listen to other music as well. And I can’t manage it.
Two songs, maybe three tops, into any other album I decide to hear, I get
separation anxiety. I get real actual pangs. I suddenly develop serious
abandonment issues. Which is when I throw away the album I’m listening to (metaphorically),
and go back to ‘Burn The Witch’. And then I feel safe and comfortable and
content and at ease and peaceful and also a little agitated and unsettled and
twitchy. So I take back all that dramatic stuff about being sick of the album
and wanting to rip out my ear-drum because I don’t. Apologies. It's a strange kind of limbo I find myself in, where I want to hear it when I'm not, but when I am I want to not. But I also do.
Anyway, so then just in terms of time spent and
obsession indulged, A Moon Shaped Pool ranks
right up there in my arbitrary list of greatest-of-all-time albums. I don’t
think it’s topped OK Computer or Kid A/Amnesiac just yet, but it’s early
days. There are a bunch of other albums on that list too (yes, I do in fact
listen to other bands as well). Most (if not all) of those albums are more than
a few years old. Which is not to say that there hasn’t been anything worth my
time in the last three or four years — not at all; quite the opposite, in fact
— or that I’m living in the past.
There’s a slightly deeper point. It’s that, I think,
the greatness of an album truly comes to the surface in hindsight. It’s hard to tell how
good a good album is when it first comes out (except maybe in exceptional
cases). Longevity, then, dictates an album’s status in the imaginary history of
music.
Like, you have to revisit an album multiple times,
across different moods and life-situations, across different contexts, to
really gauge its impact on you beyond just the immediate. And all of that takes
time. Last year, I remember falling in love with a handful of albums — off the
top of my head: The Demon Joke, Junun,
The Best Day (or was that the year before?). But I haven’t yet gone back to
that music enough to know definitively. By my own metrics, right now the most
recent set of albums on my list are from, I think, 2013. So I guess maybe
two-and-a-half-to-three years after release is an appropriate time to make an
assessment? For whatever reasons, all that’s happened in express speed with AMSP, or maybe it’s the exception.
Whatever.
But this is not one of those self-serving exercises
where I claim an album is great and you, the reader, are expected to just
believe me. (Well, it is a little bit, but it goes beyond that.) While the year
has been absolutely horrid in terms of most other things, 2016 has been great for music. I don’t want to waste time rattling off a list, but there’ve
been a lot of very cool releases this year (including these gems). For what it’s worth, it’s re-stoked my interest (which
never waned, to be honest) in the fart-filled intellectual concepts surrounding
an ‘album’ — what it stands for, how it should be released, how it’s priced,
who’s listening, why, the works.
One important factor in determining said status of
an album has to be the difficulty in zeroing in on a stand-out song (although
that applies to shitty albums just as well, but we’re assuming a basic level of
common sense here). Like: What is the stand-out song from Nevermind? Is it ‘Lithium’, or ‘In Bloom’, or ‘Polly’, or ‘Teen
Spirit’, or ‘Drain You’, or ‘Come As You Are’, or ‘Breed’? I don’t know. Apply this
to any album you love — chances are, it’ll work.
So there’s ‘Burn The Witch’, with its jittery
arrangement of strings gnawing at you, while this huge, glorious vocal melody —
that seems almost to follow an altogether different song — washes over the structure.
The squeaks get progressively more restless; the words becoming increasingly
ominous and larger-than-life. There's a fairly drastic transition into the underwater
piano opening of ‘Daydreaming’, which is such an absurdly understated song. The
first time I heard it, I kept waiting, kept expecting it to explode into like a
bigger, all-out peak of some kind (think ‘Exit Music For A Film’). Ab aayega… ab aayega… ab aayega. It
never came. Which was amazing. You know, I was hoping for a crescendo not just
on the first listen but also the second, third, and fourth ones. Took me some
six tries before I figured out the peak was already there, just that it was
buried: the slithering, shapeshifting strings that sound like a truck horn. It
grows on you in such an unnatural way, really. I don’t want to sound too gushy
(too late), but it has this remarkable quality that very few songs have, where
they end and you feel just a little shortchanged. That there should be more — I
wouldn’t want to let go just yet. The sadness of something finishing sets in
even before that something actually finishes. It is — please slap me for
resorting to such low-hanging descriptions — poignant.
As an aside, sometimes you (I) judge an album’s
greatness on just one or two songs. Like there’s this album called Spry From Bitter Anise Folds by Fifths
of Seven, a Canadian band from the Godspeed You! Black Emperor camp. I don’t
want to start describing a wholly different album now, but it has one song,
‘Rosa Centifolia’, that makes me revisit it every few months. In that respect, AMSP, just with its two opening songs,
makes the cut (plus 'Identikit'). As in, it’s good enough. You move on to ‘Decks Dark’ next, which
is when you realise that the album has this watery sense of melodic focus —
it’s channeled via big, expressive moments, but then each song is packed to the
brim with those moments, with layer after layer serving a very real, very
critical purpose. Not a note, not a single left-to-right-lilting-reverb pan
here, is extraneous.
There’s ‘The Numbers’, which has a panoramic,
pastoral sense of openness that reveals itself to you right up front with a
very endearing sense of vulnerability. ‘Present Tense’ sounds, to me, like a
songwriting synthesis of the two previous songs, ‘Identikit’ and ‘The Numbers’ — a solid enough recipe. Plus it has a playful sense of dynamic
movement that gives the song a cat-and-mouse air. Despite its very cool name
and broad and unexpected orchestral arrangements, ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor
Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief’ falls slightly short for me personally. It
gets into a very constrained space that’s often a little claustrophobic so I
have to, from time to time, skip it to avoid any onset of full-blown panic
followed by full-blown gloom.
‘Ful Stop’ has all its jazz-rocky coolness that’s
so blatant in the distant, fade-in, whirring drums, with a vocal delivery
straight from the Kid A/Amnesiac school
of obscure, mumbly, far-away lines. But, in comparison to the rest of the record,
its novelty does wear off eventually, to the point where it’s become a song I (sometimes)
skip. ‘Glass Eyes’ (yes, Thom Yorke wrote a song called ‘Glass Eyes’, as
another reminder that the band has a sense of humour) seems almost like filler
at first, until it stops being so. The song seems, for me, to fall in a space
it shares with songs like ‘Faust Arp’ or ‘Wolf At The Door’ in that it resides
on a restrained, folksy register — sort of like a calculated lull in the
narrative of the album’s story.
Back to D, since the track-list is alphabetically arranged, ‘Desert
Island Disk’, again a little folksy in its design, is a song I heard a few
months ago, when Thom Yorke premiered an acoustic version of it. I didn’t like
it much then, or when I first heard the album. But it grew from being my least
favourite song off this new record to not being that at all. It picks out these
unexpected notes that transform the song into impressionism repeatedly —
whatever that means.
Eventually, though, we must get to ‘True Love
Waits’. Here’s a song that’s been around for ages. I heard it like a decade or
something ago, after reading about it on fan forums everywhere. It was such a
thing. And it never really worked for me. Sure, the words are lovely and Yorke
really gives it everything on the acoustic version, but it was always nothing
more than a Good Song, and also a song I couldn’t claim to dislike too much
because, come on, it’s ‘True Love Waits’. But it just seemed a little bit… pedestrian.
And May happened. I change my mind about things all
the time, but I don’t remember doing a quicker about-face in the recent past. Within
the first few bars of the song, with its deconstructed chords plunked kindly on
the piano and Yorke’s older (on the verge of crackling), wiser, world-weary
voice, I was sold. Worth the wait, I’d say.
Which brings me back to my somewhat-submerged
sort-of-point, which is that I can’t figure out the stand-out song here. I’ve
had six to eight different favourites, all in four months (as detailed
painstakingly above), and I can’t make up my mind. I don’t know which ones to
skip. If I ever become a playlist-person, I don’t know which of these songs
would make it to those Happy Mood/Sad Mood/Pensive Mood/Light-Hearted
Mood/Wacky Mood lists. It’s a problem, just not one that I’m complaining about.
As a post-script, I should add that I’m well aware
that the rhapsodising here makes me one of those
people, the kind of fan everyone laughs at. But it goes further than that.
It’s dawned upon me only very recently that I’m not 17 anymore, that I haven’t
been for the past 12 years. So I’ve been living with a constant, irrational fear that
the magic may be gone. That the thrill of discovering something new will begin
to fade and the edges will get rounded off. That the boredom of age will be
couched as “personal growth”, where cynicism takes the place of rampant
enthusiasm — and Joy. So it’s as much appreciation as it is a giant fucking
relief that I haven’t yet reached that stage.
