Radiohead - Goat Shaped Code

A rare photo of Radiohead smiling. Well they've just been ranked second on my Album of the Year list. Here as a postcript to my short review of A Moon Shaped Pool here's another by a friend of mine who compiles his own end of year list of records of the year on his own blog here. Here's what he says about Radiohead and the conundrum that is Thom Yorke:

'My relationship with (“with,” like I know them and we hang out) Radiohead has become complicated, not to say vexed. I can’t quite explain it, but having loved them, even when others didn’t (for example, I might be the only living defender of King of Limbs), I recently came to kind of loathe them based on no particular reason, and on no particular piece of music. I just decided I was done with them. So when this album first came out, I decided that wasn’t going to listen to it, because fuck that whiny little bastard and his ilk. But then someone posted something positive about it, and I thought, oh ok, maybe I’ll give it a spin. And I did. And I hated it, because fuck that whiny little bastard and his ilk. But then I went back to the well a couple more times, and it started not to grow on me exactly, but to irritate me less, and then it started to grow on me, and then I started to recognize that there were actually parts of the album that are really lovely, and then I had to admit that, ok, dammit, I still like Radiohead, even though fuck that whiny little bastard, still. So I guess I liked this album against my better judgment, and indeed dismissed it out of hand for quite a while, but its charms eventually proved somewhat irresistible, which is a weird thing to say about Radiohead, who seem to do their best to uncharm you. But this has moment of sublime beauty, even if those moments are led by Thom Yorke’s relentlessly nasal well you get the idea because I’ve already gone on about it just in the same whiny little bastard way does, so sorry about that. I just opened myself up to it and it washed over me in some genuinely pleasant ways. Not only that, it actually gets better as it progresses. The stretch from “Glass Eyes” to “Present Tense” is just delightful; I would even venture to say that it’s pretty. I was surprised. I actively tried to hate this album, and I failed. I actively tried and failed to do a lot of things this year. Thanks, Radiohead.'