Review Summary: “Hold Me To This” is an average album: a nice, pleasant collection of work, but nevertheless a huge step down from “True Love Waits”. There a few standouts, but most of the album is pretty but forgettable.
The internet allows easy access to the ever-growing plethora of Radiohead covers and remixes. Literally thousands of alternate versions of “Nude” and “Reckoner” have been created using the instrumental stems, the Cold War Kids have done “Electioneering”, and even a reggae version of “Ok Computer” (“Radiodread”) has been produced.
Christopher O’Riley released “Hold Me To This” in 2005, and, like 2003’s “
True Love Waits”, it attempts to capture Thom’s voice and the group’s signature guitar, percussion, and bass lines (and plenty else on occasion) using only a single piano. Of all the Radiohead ‘tributes’ (I use the term loosely), “Hold Me to This” lies somewhere in the middle. It’s great for fans of the group but not really worthwhile on its own.
On “True Love Waits” Christopher O’Riley sampled from all across Radiohead’s career, choosing plenty of lesser-celebrated songs like “I Can’t” over patented favorites like “Paranoid Android”. Unfortunately, “Hold Me To This” makes it clear that O’Riley wasn’t simply saving some of the best songs for the second album. It’s easy to see why many of those songs were overlooked for “True Love Waits”: they may be great in the original form but don’t translate particularly well through O’Riley’s treatment.
“Paranoid Android” is a perfect example of this. It’s one of the album’s longer tracks, though a minute shorter than the original. The opening feels cluttered, and the melody too obvious. The key area where the song suffers is during the renditions of the two remarkably loud guitar sections: O’Riley flails frantically along, banging at the bottom of the keyboard, but his piano simply cannot match the intricate interactions of the guitars in the original version.
On “True Love Waits” O’Riley always went the extra step, and the piano parts were not only complex but also inspired and ambitious, often veering off into unexplored territory and taking risks, such as with the melodic replacement of Thom’s wailing pronouncement of the titular line of “Bulletproof…I Wish I Was” and the excitedly fluttered “Thinking About You” (as opposed to the slow, longer, and acoustic “Pablo Honey” version). Like “Paranoid Android”, much of “Hold Me To This” sounds like little more than the original songs played as similarly as possible on piano. “Sail to the Moon” may as well be the same as the song to appear on “Hail to the Thief” with Thom’s voice removed. “Like Spinning Plates” is the same way, though it’s closest to the live version (played on piano) that appears on “I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings”. The thundering, deep sound of “2+2=5” offers nothing new either, and as in “Paranoid Android”, the all-out climax falls flat.
Curious, then, that the biggest flop on “Hold Me To This” is “Talk Show Host”, a hard-to-find gem originally from the “Romeo+Juliet” soundtrack. O’Riley takes the short main phrase and repeats it endlessly, and the song drags on for over seven minutes and fails to ever develop into something interesting, despite plenty of tempo changes and minor variations. It’s also the quietest song on either of O’Riley’s Radiohead tributes, as if four minutes of music were simply pulled out longer. “Cuttooth” doesn’t work either; the original was a dazzling mess of chaos and confusion, a wonderful b-side, but O’Riley’s bass line is much too loud, and the song is murky and ill-conceived.
Despite these problems much of the album works beautifully, and “The Tourist” may be the best. It’s treated much in the same way as “Bulletproof…I Wish I Was”, with two effective, enjoyable buildups to two chord-driven sections of release that replace Thom’s “Hey man slowdown/Hey idiot slowdooooooown” with several lovely piano lines. “Gagging Order”, another of the many b-sides to appear on the “Hold Me To This”, is astonishingly brilliant, capturing one of Thom’s a pretty acoustic pieces even better than O’Riley’s “True Love Waits”. And “Polyethylene Part II” proves that fast, guitar-driven textures are not impossible to emulate on piano. Unlike “Paranoid Android” and “2+2=5”, here the main line is undercut by several of O’Riley’s own parts, and the result is quite fun.
“Hail to the Thief” is the only Radiohead album released between “True Love Waits” and “Hold Me To This”, and O’Riley uses its best song, “There, There”, to open. Though he simply drops the majestic drum line of the original, the song is elaborate and fully formed. The closing “Street Spirit” loses a bit to in favoring mimicry over ambition, but it’s still an effective piece.
“Hold Me To This” is an average album: a nice, pleasant collection of work (only “Cuttooth” and “Talk Show Host” are in the “loss” column), but nevertheless a huge step down from “True Love Waits”. There a few standouts, but most of the album is pretty but forgettable.
Recommended tracks:
There There
No Surprises
Polyethylene Part II
The Tourist
Gagging Order
