Radiohead Makes Order Sound Like an Unsettling Idea

The keyboard in “Everything in Its Right Place” gives the visitor enough information to stay. It is bright, recognisable and quite willing to return to its figure. A person can take some comfort from hearing that something in the record knows what it will be doing next. The voice makes the comfort difficult to use. Fragments reappear at other angles, and it can begin to sound unclear how much control the person singing has over which piece of the statement will be heard. Radiohead’s recording.

There is a temptation to hear the repeated chords as the normal music and the processing as an interruption. The record makes that division much harder to sustain. The keyboard can start to seem indifferent, even a little coercive, because it keeps offering the voice the same conditions. The altered voice can feel like the only available account of why anyone would be in trouble in such a tidy place. The two parts acquire their characters from listening to each other. Each would be a less unsettling object alone.

The effect is easy to reproduce badly

Some of the track’s prestige has travelled with its equipment and its surface. Another record can circulate recognisable fragments of a vocal in stereo and acquire an impression of experiment on terms the audience has already learnt. I am most interested in what that version misses. Radiohead give the voice something stable enough to become a problem. Each repetition allows the listener a little more time to discover that apparent order and actual ease are promises made by different things.

Part of me finds this achievement almost too persuasive. When a recording has made estrangement sound so attractive, the listener can settle into a habit of playing its uncertainty for comfort. It is a pleasure I would defend. It is also a reason to ask what exactly made the record disquieting before the sound became a recognised object of taste. The beautiful spread of the keyboard can keep some of that pressure on the voice at the very moment its pleasures seem easiest to explain.

The clever decision was to let a sound be beautiful long enough for somebody else’s difficulty to become audible against it. Music can make order sound like an argument a person is expected to accept. Few arrangements can make that expectation feel so inviting before giving us a reason to suspect it.