Radiohead: A Moon Shaped Pool - review round-up: 'An album you could grow to love more with every listen'
Characterised by Johnny Greenwood’s orchestral arrangements, the album has been a hit with the critics
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Your support makes all the difference.Back in 2012, Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher had some words of wisdom to impart onto the world about Radiohead’s frontman: “If Thom Yorke f***ing sh*t into a light bulb it’d get 9/10”.
Thankfully, Yorke and his motley crew didn’t just release the sound of grown men excreting into lightbulbs for their latest album A Moon Shaped Pool.
However, as predicted by Gallagher, the album has been met with an overwhelmingly positive response, heralded as a "triumph" by Rolling Stone and "beautiful" by The Independent.
In a 5/5 review, the Telegraph said that, while the album “may represent Radiohead at their least bloodthirsty and most accessible” there are “depths and riches here to suggest a work of total self-assurance.” Their reviewer concluded that “It is an album you could grow to love more with every listen.”
Meanwhile, NME hailed the album as an “eerie, elusive beauty” in their 4/5 review, and the New York Times congratulated the band’s “patient perfectionism” when talking about the album’s final track “True Love Waits,” a song written in the mid-90s.
Time heaped praise onto Johnny Greenwood’s orchestral arrangements, complimenting “the way in which the band widened its sonic scope to fit the cinematic vista implied by Greenwood’s orchestrations”.
In a review against the grain, Now Toronto claim it is “Radiohead’s bleakest album to date”. While mainly positive about the album, they also note in the 3/5 review: “It's weighty without feeling overwrought, which is saying a lot, but there is also a whiff of overdetermination. The abundance of care and subtle attention to detail brings the energy ceiling pretty low in places.”
As the days go on, more reviews will likely come tumbling in. For the moment, however, it looks like Radiohead has struck critical gold once again. But, as Gallagher says, was there any way they weren’t?
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