Current Best Song in the World: "We Suck Young Blood" - Radiohead
It's the handclaps that sell it - the relentless move deathward, the flatness of it. The bass flops like a dark joke. Thom Yorke is absolutely broken: the bravado of "You and Whose Army" has been crushed by "Life in a Glass House." The daring was shown to be foolishness - there's no one left to laugh at (to taunt) but himself. It's an inevitable move towards oblivion, now: Yorke's hope was fully, grotesquely, hilariously wrong. "Pyramid Song"'s black angels now swarm - they're everywhere - singing sweetly, lulling, staring with whiteless onyx eyes... The piano breakdown in the last third - feverish, a desperate assertion of life - suggests the horn-led revolution of "National Anthem," but here it is oh-so-quickly halted by the malachim. The blue stained-glass windows rise into an infinite night: "young blood" plummets from the heavens, fast asleep, falling into the angel's open mouths, onto their moonwhite teeth.
The record, as I said, is good, but it is not astonishing. I have quite a lot of faith, however, that the finished, mastered version (which this is not) may be possessed of that missing secret.