what’s the point of instruments? words are a sawed-off shotgun

The mandatory ‘In Rainbows’ post

Unless you’ve spent the last few weeks in an incredibly dark and lonely place, you’ll surely know about the recent release of Radiohead’s new album, ‘In Rainbows’. You will most likely have also heard that there are only about three people on the planet who are not currently addicted to it. None of these people have fully-functioning ears.

As it happens, I am one of the many people who think ‘In Rainbows’ is an incredible album and on a par with their magnificent fourth album, ‘Kid A’. I’ll not write you a review, as I would previously have done on ‘The Blanathema’, but you must understand that no self-respecting blogger with even a passing interest in Radiohead could avoid voicing their opinions on the album, however similar they may be to those of every other blogger and his dog. In one short(-ish) paragraph, then, I’ll sum up why I love the band’s seventh studio album so much.

Right from the opening synthetic drum beats of 15 step to the depressing closer of Videotape, there isn’t a moment where I start to get bored; even my least favourite of the ten tracks, All I Need is an impressive song that would make any other modern rock album a trillion times better - that’s how good it is. There is a solid cohesiveness to the album (something that many said was missing from ‘Hail to the Thief’) and yet at the same time it has so many different styles. In the space of a single album, one finds the jazzy, laid-back vocals of 15 Step accompanying the epic string arrangements on Faust Arp, only to be followed shortly by House of Cards and it’s unexpectedly straight-forward lyrics; who’d have ever thought they’d hear Thom Yorke singing the line “I don’t want to be your friend/ I just want to be your lover“? All in all, it’s something really special and was well worth the long, drawn-out wait.

On a similar note, I was pleased to see that the last.fm charts for this week (ending Sunday 14th October) show Radiohead taking all top 10 spots for ‘most-played track’, as well as knocking the Beatles of their top spot in the ‘overall top artist’ category. Since signing up in April, I have become a self-proclaimed last.fm addict and pay far more attention to the weekly charts on this site, both for my own profile and all the listeners combined, than I ought to. Still, they’re far better than the proper UK charts.

 

A Fresh Start

I’m Back

I’ll start by telling you that this is not my first blog; I previously wrote on a blog called ‘The Blanathema’ (which can now be spotted lurking in my relatively empty blogroll) from last September up until July this year. I let that go after getting to the point where I could no longer be bothered posting on it. Fair enough, really.

The break from writing didn’t last very long, though, did it? Soon enough I started to come across things and think “Ah, I’ll write something about that on the blog!”, quickly realising that I’d signed myself off ‘The Blanathema’ for what I had anticipated to be a long time. Anyhow, after sitting around on the computer earlier this afternoon, I decided it might be an idea to start afresh with a new blog and just write a little more sporadically, not letting it become a chore (something that blogging should never really become). That, you see, is how the ‘Acidic Turtle’ came into being, with a name almost as crap as ‘The Blanathema’ and yet another standard theme chosen from the WordPress.com archives.

After showing myself and all the readers of ‘The Blanathema’ that I can rarely go a few days without writing a load of drivel on the Internet, I can safely say that it looks like I’m going to be sticking around here for quite some time, under one guise or another. With that said, I hope you enjoy reading some of my posts, as they’ll be appearing on a regular basis whether anyone actually looks at them or not.