Figure 1. Thom Yorke shows up to the ugly sweater competition a day late and still wins. Jonny Greenwood has been 28 years old for the last two decades. There’s also three other members of the band.

So we’re well into 2021, I guess it’s time for another Artist Appraisal feature. So who’s on deck for the second installment ever of this godforsaken stillborn fetus of a blog feature? *checks notes, drops them all over the floor* uh

Ah yes, Radiohead! Let’s get right into the most overrated band in my lifetime, and- *audience boos so loud I go deaf*.

My very first encounter with Radiohead comes from the “Scott Tenorman Must Die” episode of South Park, so it was well after Pitchfork rated both OK Computer and Kid A their prestigious Perfect 10 scores and cementied their legendary statuses forever. I was only 13 and didn’t like music much yet anyway, but South Park meant the world to me back then so I happened to shelve knowledge of Radiohead’s existence in an accessible part of my brain. I first thought to actually listen to them in college. Let’s fast-forward.

OK, I think it’s maybe my junior year of college and I’m 20. In Rainbows had just dropped and Radiohead made headlines yet again because of how they offered their product directly to the consumer through their pay-what-you-want model. And again, like always, the music itself was blowjobbed all over town. It was at this point that I decided to pack my iPod with their discography and finally see what all the fuss was about.

Long story short, here I am about 13 years later and I’m still scratching my head. And after all this time listening to and enjoying decades-worth of music spanning multiple genres and piecing together all these influences, and therefore being able to hear Radiohead for what it is semi-objectively in the present day, I can simultaneously admit to understanding the appeal and accept that their music just isn’t going to hit me the way it has for countless indie and alt-rock fans. Oh well.

Figure 2. A picture is worth 1000 words and it’s just 125 instances of “PLEASE PUT US ALL OUT OF OUR MISERY”.

Radiohead currently has nine studio albums and only two are critically panned by professionals and fans alike: Pablo Honey (their first) and The King of Limbs (their eighth). The former is chalked up to a young band still trying to find their own sound, the latter chalked up to losing some steam after a near-perfect 15-year run. The rest of the albums are not only highly praised, but get top marks almost across the whole board. And I think that’s a little bit too fucking much, if you ask me. I will say this though: I agree with the consensus that Radiohead’s efforts to keep their sound fresh and innovative are mostly successful. Most of the time, the band has an incredible sensibility with respect to incorporating trends into their sound without becoming just another carbon copy of the current times, especially at the turn of the millennium. You can mostly say that no album sounds like another, but themes do repeat on occasion and even the happiest numbers still sound melancholy and hopeless due to Thom Yorke’s operatic and dramatic vocal delivery.

For all intents and purposes, though, Radiohead in their heyday got treated as the Beatles of their time, and I have an almost equal point of view of both. With each band I feel like I’m missing something, like I wasn’t alive and/or coming-of-age at the right time to be sentimental about it, like they’re both so ubiquitous that it’s hard to gain a fresh perspective. You can’t deny that Radiohead, like the Beatles, shifted the path of popular music in their own ways. It’s no surprise that Radiohead are the principal indie darlings of all time, they basically made rock music relevant again for a whole new generation. Will that happen again among all the Kanyes and the Kendricks and the Beyoncés? The cynic in me says “NO!”, but history has proven that there’s no such thing as running out of ideas no matter what some crusty old curmudgeon thinks. I’m looking at YOU, George Starostin. He’ll never read this.

My Radiohead album journey went in chronological order, so maybe Pablo Honey wasn’t the best way to dig into the band’s body of work. I will say this though: while I agree with the spirit of the criticism of Pablo Honey being a generic and disposable alt-rock album of the grunge era, the band as a whole is quite accomplished already and I wish I could hear a little bit more of this sneery vocal style from Yorke in the later albums. The Bends sees the band dropping the grunge, adding some more keyboard, and the rest is history, right? Anyway, every step along the way saw me getting more and more disillusioned as I prepared for the big “aha!” moment that never came. Tracks here and there piqued my interest, most notably “Idioteque” off of Kid A and “Faust Arp” off of In Rainbows, but as a whole I was underwhelmed. I wanted so badly to “get it”, but maybe my heavy punk/new wave preferences at the time soured my outlook from the get-go.

Fast forward to April 2020, the early stages of the pandemic, when I was working from home in the mornings and was able to stay up until 2am for a few months. I spent a lot of evenings seriously re-spinning the Radiohead catalog for the first time in years, adding The King of Limbs and A Moon Shaped Pool to the rotation. Fresh ears on A Moon Shaped Pool, and 10 more years of serious musical absorption and genuine advancement in open-mindedness, allowed me to at least appreciate that one on a level that I really hadn’t with the rest of the band’s output, particularly the catchy opener “Burn the Witch” and the lush string interstitials of “The Numbers”. I have a new fondness for each album’s individual personalities and I can appreciate their career for the inventive and groundbreaking process that it was and still is to this day. However, I still don’t have considerable emotional attachment to much of it, and I don’t think at this point that I ever will. And Thom Yorke is one ugly motherfucker.

Figure 3. The stoned elf shapeshifter takes the form of pasty Brad Pitt and logs onto AOL 3.0.

BOTTOM LINE: Kid A is my favorite followed by In Rainbows and then A Moon Shaped Pool. I think both Pablo Honey and The King of Limbs are more interesting than ANYBODY gives them credit for and I’d rate both over Amnesiac, which I think no one would like if it wasn’t a Radiohead album. OK Computer is still a tough nut for me to crack, and perhaps it’s because anything revolutionary about it has been lost over the years to progressing musical trends and devices, and on its own merits it might not be the powerhouse it once was. I think I like The Bends better than that one. Hail to the Thief is entertaining, but a little overlong and bloated. And that’s about it until my perceptions shift with more time.

I have not listened to Thom Yorke’s solo output yet. I listened to Ed O’Brien’s debut Earth from last year a few times and was largely bored (“Shangri-La” is a great opener, too bad the rest wasn’t as pleasurable). Like everything else I won’t give up on Radiohead anytime soon, and maybe some day I’ll do Deep Discography Dive with an unduly load of low ratings and then the internet can yell at me about it.

SAMPLE IDENTIFICATION

Artist: Ætheria Conscientia
Album: Corrupted Pillars of Vanity
Release Year: 2021
Country: France
Label: Independent
Studio Album No.: 2
Genre(s): Atmospheric Black Metal / Progressive Metal / Post-Metal
Tracklist:
1. Asporhos’ Altering Odyssey – 15:11
2. The Corrupted Sacrament – 07:13
3. Liturgy for the Ekzunreh – 08:52
4. Elevation in Arrogance – 10:58
5. Collapse in Penance – 13:42
Total: 55:56

BACKGROUND

There’s not much to find about Ætheria Conscientia. Woefully unknown and active since 2016, the atmospheric progressive black metal band takes the classical symphony approach with albums comprised of longform movements. Their Bandcamp page describes their sound as “somewhere between black metal, jazz and prog”. Musical and lyrical themes focus heavily on science fiction, particularly outer space, but God knows I can’t understand the lyrics anyway so I’ll take their word for it! Per their Bandcamp page, the album “focuses on an ancient caste of ominous guardians, the Kholoss, from their origins to their enslavement by truth seeking fanatics, in the name of an iconoclastic quest”, so it sounds pretty fucking nerdy. They only have two albums so far, this one and their debut album Tales from Hydhradh. I haven’t heard the debut yet, but my best guess is that Corrupted Pillars of Vanity is more of the same if extensive track lengths and made-up World of Warcraft-type words like “Ekzunreh” are part of the whole package. I don’t remember how I discovered Ætheria Conscientia, but Corrupted Pillars of Vanity got a favorable review on No Clean Singing and I’m making a point in 2021 to listen to as much brand new, critically acclaimed niche metal as I can. So here we are.

METALLURGICAL EVALUATION

I’m not afraid of any band that fashions themselves as “progressive” or “experimental” within their genre, so long as they actually deliver on their promises. My first impressions were very positive. Black metal, as a rule, means that it’s perfectly acceptable to have NO rules as long as you stick to certain key attributes (especially mood). It’s the most boundless of the various metal subgenres. I prefer my black metal bands to take full advantage of this wiggle room and try out some out-of-the-box shit, and Ætheria Conscientia delivers with heavy use of the sexy, sexy saxophone! Saxophone isn’t just peppered throughout the music, oh no, it’s slathered my good man! Both as an instrument of skronky background atmosphere (mostly) and an instrument of eerie soloing (occasionally, maybe only once actually).

To my ears, the saxophone is really the only truly original component of this flavor of post-/black metal, but there are also quite a bit of passages with the acoustic guitar and piano serving mainly as pretty, lighthearted contrast. The mammoth tracks feature the usual fare of slow, pounding riffs and desolate, hoarse vocals you’d get from the likes of sludge bands such as Neurosis or Cult of Luna. You even get sections with bongo-y tribal drumming that you got 25 years ago from Neurosis, so the influence is easy to pin down. But I don’t mind that at all, you see, because Neurosis is a smart band that smartly incorporated their smarty offbeat non-metal elements and it’s clear that Ætheria Conscientia wants to follow in their footsteps. I think they’re doing a bang-up job!

NOW THE MINOR GRIPES. This is supposed to be space and science fiction black metal. Even the band name “Ætheria Conscientia”, roughly translating from Latin to “celestial consciousness” or something to that effect, suggests the cosmos. I don’t hear enough of that in their sound. In fact, with all the snakey basslines, Arabic and Persian scales, and guttural Michael Gira-esque faux-Tuvan throat singing, my mind’s eye sees WAY more imagery of ancient civilizations. You know, the ones that were right here on, uh…Earth. For space and sci-fi I need washes of psychedelia, industrial drumming, otherwordly vocal effects, cold robotic textures, but none of this is present on the album with any sort of deliberation. So, as it stands, I’m left to make my own ancient-Egypt-was-actually-an-alien-encounter connections à la Stargate, and that’s hella grasping at straws. Again, these are minor gripes, but atmosphere is everything with black metal. Corrupted Pillars of Vanity misses the mark here.

Figure 1. Nothing says “employable” quite like a collarbone tattoo with the words “kill yourself”. For that matter, try not looking like long-haired Jeffrey Dahmer either.

CONCLUSIONS

As of this writing I’ve listened to Pillars of Corrupted Vanity eight times in full. I find it tough to assign sentimentality to this kind of music right away, even after multiple listens. This is an album to binge on at the beginning, revisit occasionally, and see where I stand a couple years from now. All I can say right now is that I find it enjoyable in the moment, although much of it meanders and I zone out here and there. The saxophone doesn’t break any ground, obviously, but at least it’s an element that’s unique enough to help the band stand apart from the other nine million bands currently making the same kind of music. I also enjoy the smatterings of Middle Eastern influence and the tribal drumming passages, Neurosis ripoffs notwithstanding. I look forward to listening to their debut and any future offerings! Hopefully they adjust their sound somewhat to better match their thematic motif. There, see, I have nothing truly offense to say! Good job, Ætheria Conscientia! Now clean up your look, that’s not how you get girls.