The 5 Stages of "King of Limbs"

1. Anticipation

Oh my god.  New Radiohead.  New.  Radiohead.  Why isn't it here yet?  I can't wait.  I hope it's as good as [OK Computer/Kid A/In Rainbows/Amnesiac].  Of course it will be - it will be better. Thom Yorke is incapable of anything other than complete genius and he would never do anything that wasn't frickin' A-mazing.  OK, I mean [Pablo Honey/Hail to the Thief/Amnesiac] wasn't my favorite, but it's probably my fault;  I just didn't listen to it hard enough. Yes, definitely my fault.  ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod...

2. Confusion

What's up with the first track?  I mean it doesn't really sound like In Rainbows, which was awesome.  It's good though, right?  I just thought there was going to be more [traditional song structure/accessible lyrics/layered sounds/stilted rythms] and less [traditional song structure/accessible lyrics/layered sounds/stilted rythms].

3. Denial

Yeah, it's totally genius.  Going with that [annoying looping rhythm/screeching vocals/disembodied computer voice/sampled piano] was an artistic reinvention.  It's a whole new ballgame and Thom was right to throw off the shackles of the last album.  It's just sooo good that it's ahead of everybody else and we have to catch up.  Genius.  Definitely genius. Couldn't be anything but genius because everyone knows Radiohead is genius and if this isn't genius that would mean everything that came before wasn't genius either and that would just be unbearable.

4. Anger  

IT WAS ALL A LIE.  This makes no sense.  This isn't another  [OK Computer/Kid A/In Rainbows/Amnesiac]!  It's worse than [Pablo Honey/Hail to the Thief/Amnesiac] - it's just noise.  No wait, it's still just my fault.  I didn't listen hard enough - if I listen to it a second time OH WHO AM I KIDDING IT'S JUST WEIRD FOR THE SAKE OF WEIRD. 

5. Acceptance

OK, I guess I really do like Give up the Ghost and Little by Little.  It's kind of a pared down In Rainbows, almost going back to Kid A, but still with some of the accessibility of [OK Computer/The Bends/In Rainbows]. Bloom is starting to grow on me, too.  And Codex... Well, Thom Yorke sure can do still do that 'sweet sadness' better than anybody else - it might even be up there with Exit Music or Motion Picture Soundtrack.  Wonder why they didn't put it at the end of the album.  I think I could live without Feral or Lotus Flower - and what's up with the album length? Only 8 songs?  Kinda weird.  OK, so maybe it's not another [OK Computer/Kid A/In Rainbows] but it's still better than 90% of the albums I'm going to buy this year, and definitely more inventive and unique than 99% of them.  

Radiohead Pre-order

I'm a little disappointed that Radiohead decided not to stick with the 'pay-what-you-want' model they tested  for "In Rainbows," but I'm way too excited for a new Radiohead album to let it get me down.

Be the first kid on your block to pre-order "King of Limbs"

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

"The ArchAndroid" is curiously schizophrenic and obsessively polished at the same time - it's a big, meaty, unpredictable mess of an album that calls to mind Outkast's "Stankonia" in its arc from track to track, bouncing across styles at a blistering pace (Classical to 40's jazz to 60's pop to R&B and back again), and yet, unlike Outkast's album, each individual track is fiercely controlled, and musically far more refined.  Monae's split Android/Human persona is ultimately a good metaphor for the split personality of the music.

Monae is at her best when she embraces that control and puts the (considerable) energy at her disposal behind it.  In "Dance or Die" and "Faster" the frenetic pace of the music works well against her exceptionally tight vocal work - in the first track it's a monotone rap laid out as only an android could over techno-cuban rhythms and a Miami Sound Machine-worthy chorus.  I love the bass work throughout the album, and particularly on "Dance or Die" - it's intelligent and yet visceral, drawing on latin music to keep the energy alive without dumbing down.  The transition from that track into "Faster" is just spectacular;  The songs couldn't be more different, with one techno/latin and the next a sped-up 60's pop piece along the lines of "These Boots are Meant for Walkin'", and she does both feels justice.

Monae's vocal talents are undeniable and, to my ear, refreshing.  Her voice is exceptionally pure, drawing on those 60's pop influences for a clean sound totally at odds with the excessive-vibrato R&B belting that seems to have become the gold-standard for American female vocalists.  It's exceptionally gratifying to hear a truly wonderful singer eschew the cliche'd baroque embellishments and rely on the simple strength of her own voice.  You won't hear Mariah/Beyonce/Christina vocals-for-their-own-sake, and it's a relief. 

If "The ArchAndroid" has a flaw, it's that it's too much robot, not enough woman.  Monae's performance can come off as theatrical - on "Come Alive (War of the Roses)" she sings "That's when I come alive / Like a schizo running wild" in what should be wild abandon, but she still sounds more like an actress playing crazy than a woman losing control.  I can't help but wonder if this isn't Big Boi's influence - his work is so tightly wound that it sometimes needs Andre 3000's explosive nature to keep it in balance.

Still, the album is breathtaking in its scope of influences alone and it handles each of them exceptionally well - I would love to hear her tackle slightly more personal subject matter, but oddly enough, after listening through several rounds, I started to feel that the album in its entirety is a sort of self-portrait, expressing exuberant passions and conflicting tensions of control and release that really do say something about Janelle Monae, even if the individual tracks sometimes feel like screens that she hides behind.

Hardwired

There's a funny thing that happens occasionally on my way home from work.  As I reach Porter Square, it's not uncommon for the infamous Porter Square escalator  to be out of service, which makes for 6-story vertical climb.  Not fun.  But the interesting thing is what happens when I try to step on to the stalled escalator:  A brief but intense moment of vertigo as my brain reacts to the split second delay before my foot makes contact with the stair.  I know the escalator is not moving. I know not to expect the tread to rise to meet my descending foot.  But somehow, and this is the part that fascinates me, some part of my brain has been optimized purely for getting on and off escalators, and yet it isn't quite able to figure out that a non-working escalator is just a stair.

That's the odd thing about brains - we experience reality as objective and fixed, but behind the scenes our minds are doing all kinds of weird processing to make the world more comprehensible.  Optical illusions are the classic example used in Cog Sci 101 classes.  My personal favorites are the gray contrast illusions, since their application to the real world is so clear:

(Licensed under Creative Commons. Author information here.)

The gray bar in the center is the exact same shade throughout, and yet we see it as lighter on one side and darker on the other.  Our visual cortex is 'enchancing' the contrast in order to improve edge-detection.  This has huge advantages in the natural world, especially where you might need to distingush a camouflaged predator (or prey) from its surroundings.

So by now some of my readers (maybe even both of you) might be wondering what this has to do with music.  The fascinating thing about music (at least for me) is that it exists at all, let alone why it is so prevalent throughout human society.  Every culture has it's own form, and even music in another language can attract passionate fans.  It appears to have no obvious evolutionary value, and yet this appreciation for music has real neuro-psychological underpinning. Arstechnica has a great writeup on research showing how listening to a beloved piece of music causes dopamine releases in the brain. This activation of the mesolimbic system appears to be associated with both mental reward and memory.

But why does it exist?  Babies can distinguish the "mood" of music as early as 5 months of age: does this mean that music is hardwired into us from birth?  Or does the substantial amount of brain dedicated to auditory processing simply respond well to such complex stimuli?  I don't know of any definitive answers to these questions, but as I read more I'll post what I find out here.

The Middle Class Are Evil

Ah, the suburbs.  Punching bag of artists, aesthetes, malcontents and the generally disaffected everywhere. Clearly, most of America lives in a wasteland of deferred dreams, nattering, painful, pointless conversations and a secret loathing for themselves that can only end in death or the complete abandonment of all the stifling mores that once held them in thrall.  Think 'American Beauty'.

Enter Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs".  This album topped so many 'best of' lists for 2010 that I just had to dig it out and give it another listen.

Arcade Fire is part of odd little trend in music:  outsized Canadian bands.  Stars, New Pornographers, and Broken Social Scene all come to mind.  They all feature heavy instrumentation (partly due to the sheer number of members in each band), melodramatic subject matter (maybe because they're Canadian?), and indie artistry laid over surprisingly catchy pop-hooks.  For me, it's pretty hit or miss.  Stars "Set Yourself on Fire" was a thrilling, if heavy-handed mishmash of pop-punk anarchism and candy-sweet love songs, while their follow-on "In Our Bedroom After the War" was unlistenably melodramatic.

If you listened to  prior Arcade albums, "Funeral" and "Neon Bible", or any of the bands mentioned above, you have some idea what to expect from "The Suburbs" and Arcade does not disappoint.  These are structurally very simple songs laid over with an eclectic mix of instruments in careful (and often intriguing) arrangements, played with anthem-level intensity.  It's style that works brilliantly on "Neon Bible" - after all, what theme could better suit such an baroque, dramatic style than our culture's near-religious obsession with media and fame?

But it just doesn't suit "The Suburbs".  Every lyric drips with disaffection:

But I would rather be alone
Than pretend I feel alright
If the businessmen drink my blood
Like the kids in art school said they would
Then I guess I'll just begin again

If you're going to pull off words like those, you need some rea Cobain-style bored anger, howled out over a barely-tuned guitar.   But these songs are so intricately played and planned, that the disaffection comes off as a pose. It's like writing a love song in heroic couplets;  Who's going to believe that your heart is pouring out words that just can't be contained anymore when you're rhyming every line?

It's not their most interesting album musically, either.  The driving 'four-on-floor' beats and Springsteen-esque hammering on the guitar doesn't leave much room for dynamic range on this album.  Even weaker tracks on "Neon Bible" (including the title track) vary the feel enough to make the next song that much more interesting contrast.  The segue from "Neon Bible's" spare, thumping drum and aetherial backing vocals to the swelling church organ of "Intervention" keeps the album moving where "The Suburbs" barely even changes tempo.

Slamming the 'burbs is a time-honored trope in hipster circles, but there just isn't much here to give it a new take.  I guess you can't make the kind of sweeping grandiosity that makes Arcade Fire the band they are out of such a nihilist subject.