Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 1/10

Life must be made of peaks and troughs, it cannot be all plain sailing, for where is the joy in steering a boat across a perfectly still body of water if you haven’t learned to manoeuvre it in storm tossed oceans; conversely where is the delight in living underground in the dark if you haven’t experienced a single day in the sunshine.

Life is there to be enjoyed, not endured and yet someone somewhere completely forgot to tell Thom Yorke and Radiohead the point of such actions in existence as they release A Moon Shaped Pool on the world, a release that has the ability to spread the blues, deep issues of desolate melancholy come riding in like the wind, silently and without reproach, and without the possibility of anything resembling the slow momentum of a smile on a blue donkeys face. Life has meaning here but it is one that possibly even the most dedicated Radiohead fan might consider too bleak to really get on board with.

There is art even in the most disturbing or depressing of music, and even in this particular album the listener can understand the sound of someone trying to alert the airwaves to the majesty of their own thoughts and dramas, the observations of the detached and downcast; yet even with art in mind, A Moon Shaped Pool is an album so unlikeable, so downbeat in its response to any stimuli, it regards even the very act of drawing breath to be laboured and a fruitless cause.

There are bands that you want to succeed, that you want their art to be heard because they fulfil a need, an expression that might forever just languish in the void. The trouble with A Moon Shaped Pool is that it doesn’t fully comprehend what the band perhaps were asking of it; high end art or the suffering endured by the tolerant, something’s in life are just too awkward, unsatisfactory and deeply dull to ever really want to live beyond the first pause of breath.

A deeply uninspiring album that tried too hard, no natural affinity with a search for joy, even the barest grain, to be found; a real shame because Radiohead should not fall so far from grace.

Ian D. Hall