Radiohead's 'Moon Shaped Pool': Latest entry in the event-album sweepstakes

Releasing your super-secret, heretofore not-known-to-exist album with absolutely no advance notice to surprise the internet and snap the music world to attention? That's soooo early 2016, like something Kendrick Lamar would have done - and did, with his unexpected Untitled Unmastered - way back in March, for goodness sake.

The new strategy, it seems, for fans trying to to figure out how they can actually listen to new music by their favorite acts, is a little different.

Instead of ambushing them out of the blue - as Beyoncé did in 2013 when she revealed her previous, self-titled album with a midnight Instagram post - you tease with a hint beforehand, so fans can be ready to convene for a virtual listening party.

That's what Beyoncé - who plays Lincoln Financial Field June 5 - did this time with the deservedly celebrated new Lemonade. BeyHive members knew that was going to be the name of a prime-time HBO special one Saturday night late last month, even if they didn't know exactly what was coming. Thus, they were ready to be surprised.

A heads-up that the big reveal is coming was also the strategy employed by Radiohead, the erudite and expressive British art-rock band whose extremely pretty, exquisitely sad A Moon Shaped Pool (XL nolead begins **** nolead ends ) was made available at 2 p.m. Eastern last Sunday, right in the middle of your Mother's Day brunch.

Before A Moon Shaped Pool was released, there were plenty of mysterious moves that hinted something epic was about to happen.

A week earlier, the band scrubbed its web presence entirely clean - the Radiohead Facebook and Twitter feeds and band home page went blank - suggesting the always tech-savvy band, who let loose their album In Rainbows as an internet-only release in 2007 - were up to something sneaky.

By Friday of that week, two singles - "Burn the Witch," with a cute stop-motion animation video, and "Daydreaming," with a clip directed by Paul Thomas Anderson - were available, along with word that the band's as-yet-unnamed first album in five years was coming in two days on Sunday.

(To add to music fans' whiplash and sense that the world is full of unexpected things, on that same day, Justin Timberlake dropped his would-be song-of-the-summer jam "Can't Stop the Feeling," and Brit singer-producer James Blake surprise-released his sterling new The Colour in Anything, which features two collaborations with long AWOL nuevo R&B star Frank Ocean.)

So Radiohead, like Beyoncé, provided a specific time for fans to free themselves up for a first-hearing communal event that, unlike Canadian rapper Drake's Views (a Thursday midnight release a few weeks back), didn't require staying up past your bedtime.

How to hear it, of course, was another puzzle, as is increasingly the case with marquee releases. Options included downloading on iTunes, ordering vinyl from the band's own website, or streaming it on Apple Music or Tidal.

Pointedly, Pool is not available on Spotify, still by far the largest streaming service, though singer Thom Yorke did not mince words by calling it "the desperate fart of a dying corpse" in decrying the company's low royalty rates.

Neither Drake's Views nor Beyoncé's Lemonade are available on Spotify, either, as the artists have divergent allegiances. Beyoncé made hers available initially only on Tidal, and Drake's exclusive deal is with Apple Music, which did not keep him from entering the charts at number one.

The "celestial jukebox" future has arrived, when all the music ever made is on the cloud and at your fingertips. To access it all, however, you have to subscribe to multiple streaming services.

Also like Lemonade, Radiohead's A Moon Shaped Pool appears to be a work deeply affected by relationship strife. Yorke last year announced his separation from Rachel Owens, his girlfriend of 23 years and mother of his two children.

And just as Lemonade's rage has been parsed for clues to Beyoncé's husband Jay Z's supposed cheating, the dystopian melancholy that suffuses A Moon Shaped Pool - of course it does; it's a Radiohead album! - the quintet's songs are being interpreted, probably too single-mindedly, as missives from the singer's broken heart.

Certainly, it's hard not to hear the tail end of "Daydreaming," in which the 47-year-old Yorke seems to backward-sing "Half of my life," as a mournful goodbye to the relationship that has spanned most of his adulthood. And as with Lemonade, in which a more immediately personal Beyoncé is presented rather than the invulnerable super-diva, Pool gives us a human, flesh-and-blood Radiohead, not quite as chilly and intellectual as we're accustomed to.

Many Pool songs have been kicking around for years. In the case of "True Love Waits," the closing track recorded with the aid of the London Contemporary Orchestra, the song was first performed in 1995 during the tour for the album The Bends, back when Radiohead seemed like a garden-variety Brit-rock band and not the avatars of cyberalienation and dissociative innovation they turned out to be.

In that way, the album adopts a fairly common older-band strategy of turning through its own back pages in search of song ideas. Sometimes that works wonders - most of the songs on the Rolling Stones' Tattoo You (1981), for instance, dated back at least to the session for Some Girls (1978), one reason it was as good as it was.

With Pool, the band's approach of cobbling together older bits and pieces results in a firm foundation for an album that is much more of a conventional psychedelic folk album than we would expect from a band normally captivated by avant sounds and structures.

But perhaps that shouldn't be a surprise from a band that has pulled off the impressive feat of maintaining a cutting-edge reputation while playing together for more than 30 years. Moon Shaped Pool has been largely greeted with critical hosannahs, in several instances being cited as their best album since Kid A.

Part of that rapturous reception, I think, is the result of the new event-album environment, where it's easy to get caught up in the Twitterverse enthusiasm of the moment, and greatness is proclaimed with the highest possible snap-judgment praise of being "fire" or perhaps "lit." Or, better yet, emojis that say as much with fewer keystrokes.

I don't think the new Radiohead is quite that great - on first passes through, I've found Blake's similarly atmospheric Colour to be more emotionally enveloping.

But if the album - whose title, for me, evokes Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box" - is tepid at points, it's also gorgeous, a delicately orchestrated endeavor wonderfully sung by Yorke, an underrated vocalist whose melodic meanderings sound good no matter what he's nattering on about. A Moon Shaped Pool is indeed lit, but with a slow-burning flame that doesn't demand you drop everything and listen to it right now.

ddeluca@phillynews.com
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