I was excited in 2001 to hear Radiohead's live album. I had never seen them in concert (that wouldn't happen until the Hail To the Thief tour 2 summers later), & having exhausted their first 5 studio albums, I was craving new Radiohead material. Once I got my hands on it, I was a bit baffled by what I had heard, but today I think I understand that I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings was never meant to be a comprehensive live album, but rather a document of what their show was like at this stage (like how Rush used to do it). As Radiohead's music grew beyond the limitations of the 5-piece rock band, it became more difficult to translate to live performance. How could they do justice to songs built on EDM & ambient elements without losing their rock-band essence? I Might Be Wrong, a selection of live performances of songs from Kid A & Amnesiac (the band's least guitar-driven records), shows how they threaded that needle, while reminding us of the essential roles played by some of the less celebrated band members.
For instance, bassist Colin Greenwood proves how valuable he is as the driving force of songs like "The National Anthem," "I Might Be Wrong," & "Dollars and Cents." He is also responsible for the lovely counter-melody of "Morning Bell" while Jonny & Ed (whose backing vocals are at the same level as Thom's leads) play competing angular guitar chords in a throwback to the band's old 3-guitar days.
It's also interesting to hear how hard the live engineers had to work to capture the sounds of the records, from Thom's reverb-drenched vocal mic on "I Might Be Wrong" (where he sways back & forth so the lyrics seem to drift in & out of comprehensibility), to the various filters applied to Phil Selway's drumkit to approximate the drum machines on the studio versions of "Idioteque" & "Everything In Its Right Place." That latter song is the most impressive achievement on the record, with the live sampling & manipulation of the vocals (I think by Jonny?) that turns into an extended outro vamp, all while Colin's solid bassline holds down the fort.
It's worth noting that there are songs from the duo of studio albums this selection pulls from that would be rather easy to recreate in concert--like "How to Disappear Completely" or "Knives Out"--that have been left off in favor of totally novel arrangements like the pulsing synths & sound effects of "Like Spinning Plates" transformed into a "Pyramid Song"-esque piano ballad. The emphasis here is on hypnotic grooves reminiscent of minimalist music, like the band is challenging themselves to make these moods fit with their live presentation. On the whole, it works stunningly well.
There was one brand new (at the time) song here: "True Love Waits," which was a live staple that finally got the studio treatment a full 15 years later on A Moon Shaped Pool in an electric piano arrangement rather than the solo acoustic guitar version heard here. As far as I'm concerned, the studio version completely supplants the live one, thanks to Thom's awful habit of singing sharp, which seems more egregious when there are fewer instruments to cover it (see the live acoustic version of "Creep" from the My Iron Lung EP).
I almost never throw I Might Be Wrong into the player anymore. It's a fine representation of their live sound, but with the possible exception of "Like Spinning Plates," there's not really anything here you can't get from the studio versions of these songs. But as a historical document & exemplar of their fealty to their music's thornier elements in a concert context--especially since it's the only live album they ever officially released--it is nothing short of essential.
No comments:
Post a Comment