Radiohead are the most elite of all musicians of my generation, a juggernaut of creative and commercial power whose creations will be handed down through the ages. The band's long career has seen them traverse peaks and valleys easily worthy of Grecian epic poetry. Before their 2011 album King of Limbs, Radiohead had released seven critically adored, classic albums, and they each sold at least 1 million copies. Remarkable considering the density and Shakespearean-scale "anti-fun" quality of their work. However, when Radiohead self-released King of Limbs, things went a little differently. It was a modestly promoted event a full four years after their previous album. Sales topped out at about 400,000. A failure.....
On this misfit album resides "Codex," one of the greatest songs I think Radiohead have ever written and songs in general I have ever heard.
Radiohead are masters of excess - songs of manic complexity, tracked and tracked again with byzantine layers of instruments, layers of meaning, and layers of intermeaning. Thom Yorke, the band's leader, vocalist, and chief songwriter, is the Stanley Kubrick of modern music. The songs can be bombastic, plaintiff, murky, cacophonic, ploddingly slow, or clipping quick, but the common denominator is usually that you are getting a massive production, from the scientifically deduced drum sound up to the peaks of formal melodic/harmonic craft.
"Codex" is a song written by a master who has seen plenty of the world and creative mountain tops, and now is ready to descend into a cool lake and feel the simple, silent invigoration of freshwater on sore limbs.
In a kind of conciliation, the song has really only three musical elements: Piano, horns, and voice.
The piano is gorgeous. It holds a single three-chord progression for the whole introduction, which continues as the first words are called out and held in a glacially long sustain. It is only after this long first phrase of the verse melody that the piano breaks into a new chord, and it is a rich, dark downward movement. Even greater, from this low chord a wonderful upward progression quickly flourishes, and suddenly the song gains an elegiac tone that is just alien in the dour Radiohead repertoire.
You're not even prepared for the horns. Horns are just horns, after all. If you have never heard this song and I tell you there are horns in this song, you would probably just nod and mutter, "Hmph, okay, horns." You're not even prepared for the horns. They are the hard sunlight livening the glass lake of this scene.
The voice of Thom Yorke can cause some grumbling. Especially in later albums, he tends to rely on a thinner whine like a tic. His earlier work was much more full-throated, declamatory. In "Codex," he recaptures a bit of that old voice, heavily tempered by a weight, maybe inspired by that weighty piano sound or brought to that point by his many experiences. I feel like he saw himself sitting at some kind of unique stopping point the way Paul McCartney did when he wrote an amazing piano song about seeking peace called "Let It Be." Paul, too, settled on a uniquely sober voice for that song, fitting that strange moment in an artist's life (and it's kind of a hobby of mine to study artists' lives) when they seem allow themselves to look back on the valleys behind them from their very rarely ascended peaks. And they seem to take a moment to consider what, in their restless youths, even fired them to deviate this far from the common human experience, and in an ambivalent way regret it.
But that's on them.
We can repurpose their unknowable cries for simplicity for our own very complex lives, lives in which there are places we too arrive after years of unconscious travel, and where we wonder, in a quiet moment of equal regret and pride, what madness got us there.
The lyrics employ a technique called economy. Economy is not simplicity. These words describe a short sequence at a "clear lake," maybe real, maybe imagined. Have you ever allowed yourself to slip into a cold lake in the morning? I have, a still mountain lake, and I'll tell you what I remember. I remember the miraculous trees and mountains above and around me. The absolute pure feeling of that water. Exhaling sharply as my lungs convulsed with the first chill. Hating that painful moment and then forgetting. In the song, the singer is all alone in a scene like this. In my experience, I wasn't alone, but the moment my head went under the water I might as well have been. And when I return to that memory, it is me and those sensations, and that's it.
Maybe you're not somebody who needs a place in your mind like that to go. I need it and this song equally.
Headphones recommended.
