"New Grass": Floral Music

Because we separate like ripples on a blank shore

This lyric from Radiohead's "Reckoner" is as elliptical as it is intimate. And, since Thom Yorke's singing it, it also sounds dripping with beautiful meaning. But I have no idea what it's about. Likewise, there's something about the rest of "Reckoner" that is impossible for me to get my head around, and so I feel like I can never love it enough. Everything about it – the jumbled chord progressions, the haphazard arrangement that gradually fumbles into self-awareness – seems intended to mirror nature's asymmetrical sprawl. The way that home decorators or architects try to be visually unpredictable by avoiding rigid shapes and too many straight lines. It's as if Radiohead have taken that design principle and applied it to a song. Most music comes in boxes of verses and choruses, but "Reckoner" is floral.

Because it has no real beginning or end, it seems impermanent too. The track starts abruptly with a crude edit, chopping in on a loose, wide-open drum pattern already in progress. The sound of the kit is harsh and roomy and is almost swallowed by bright, rattling percussion. The playing is almost juvenile – the way good musicians who are non-drummers can usually bang their way through a beat and still sound respectable, if not fluid. A guitar starts to noodle under it, without confidence. Yorke begins moaning words in falsetto and because you can't make out what he's saying it gives the impression of somebody trying to improvise lines for a melody they've been workshopping. It all feels unplanned, but before too long a bass, and then a rhodes piano, drop in and plenty of structure begins to arrive in the form of medieval chord changes, plumes of incandescent strings, and the muffled harmonies of what sounds like a barbershop quartet singing underwater. Then, as abruptly as it appeared, the song fades into the ether, taking its jostling, tambourine-cluttered melancholy with it.

Because it's so untidy, the effect that "Reckoner" has on me is of being on the verge of a listening catharsis that never arrives. I'm moved but I can never quite capture a sense of release, and so the pleasure is inexhaustible. Tantric.

"Reckoner" is one-of-a-kind, but it's not the first time a song has given me this feeling. With its floral shape, and a compositional style that hovers at a musical melting point – going in and out of crystallization – it seems like a sister to Talk Talk's "New Grass," from their final album Laughing Stock.




Laughing Stock, and its predecessor Spirit of Eden (released in '91 and '88 respectively) came as the band was facing burnout with their successful synth-pop sound and decided to scrap everything to reinvent themselves. They are perfect, astounding albums and are generally considered to be among the first explosions of post-rock.

In a sense, Talk Talk were trying to reverse-engineer their music. They wanted to compose the sound of spontaneity, and make recordings that were fully-realized while also having the sense of disorder and discovery captured on their home demos. Easier said than done. According to co-producer and engineer Phil Brown, who wrote about the sessions for Tape Op Magazine, the band recorded for months straight, in near total darkness, experimenting with repetition and disjointedness. Rather than try to hammer out an arrangement as a band and then nail it to tape, they built their tracks in pieces of this, scraps of that, always looking for a way out of traditional form. There were stretches when all they tracked were the same two-chords of guitar, strummed over and over, or the same drum bar, looped endlessly, for days at a time, while the rest of the band sat in the control room listening attentively for the right kind of happy accidents. This brought complaints from other recording suites in the same complex and, worse, drummer Lee Harris developed a nervous disorder and had to leave for a few months in the middle of the Laughing Stock sessions, suffering from exhaustion.

Even though that sounds like pure torture, Talk Talk finally got that rare mix of improv and collage they were after and left a conceptual blueprint for everyone from Fugazi to Bark Psychosis to Radiohead (lead singer Mark Hollis was incomprehensible long before Thom Yorke made mumbling famous). And there's no better example of what they discovered than the perfectly named "New Grass." Over a bed of crooked jazz drumming and hollow organ swells, tufts of reverberated guitar and plump clusters of piano chords sprout out of cracks in the mix. It sounds random yet preordained, like the examined life. It's gorgeousness without end, the sound of something growing.

Radiohead "Reckoner" [From In Rainbows]

Talk Talk "New Grass" [From Laughing Stock]