Ah, writing about Radiohead. It’s the right of passage for any wannabe internet journalist or music message board poster.
Forget about the “innovative” download release method. That whole thing was a gigantic cock tease, since people couldn’t even hear the album in it’s intended full sound quality unless they waited for the CD. The download scheme was pure marketing, and it created the media shitstorm they needed, since they no longer had a major label promotion budget. Now that I have the CD in hand, I’m glad to forget the whole thing ever happened.
So, this is the new Radiohead album. After 10 months, I finally feel I’ve had time to digest it and recognize some of it’s true character. Radiohead inevitably takes time to sink in for anybody. A listener’s affair with the band may initially start with rejection due to distaste for the surface elements of a given album, whether it be the schizo black mood clang and clatter of Amnesiac, the spectral hypnotics and swamp gas of Kid A, the wailing walls of OK Computer’s drama, or the subdued flavor and repetitive guitar chords of In Rainbows. No matter, the fascination will always remain, desire to solve the mystery of the band’s appeal churning below the surface.
Fans of the band, when describing their musical effect, often use powerful and evocative imagery such as “Oh, yeah! I like Radiohead! I definitely dig their…sound! They’re just so…so…I don’t know! I hear they’re AMAZING live!”. I’m not sure I can do any better.
When the In Rainbows download was released in October 2007 (followed by the CD in January), it had been four and a half years since Hail To The Thief was released, their longest development period between albums. People thought 3 years was a long time to wait between OK Computer and Kid A, this was an even more unbearable stretch. Unlike that recording timeframe, though, this new one did not result in experimentation or the destruction and reconceptualization of the band’s sound. In Rainbows is, more or less, ten rock songs with light interwoven electronic elements.
Instead of the sprawling, wildly inconsistent Hail To The Thief, this is streamlined and efficient, traveling in a perfect straight line. This isn’t the band that succeeded in bursting open rock music from within. The dust has settled, only the bare open spaces and empty frames of houses remain.
At first, it doesn’t sound like enough. I couldn’t tell if they were purposely holding back more than they revealed, or if they lost sight of their trajectory and landed on Earth to settle down. Eventually, one starts to see arcing lines connecting between the songs, hanging them on display, changing their meaning by spatial relation to each other. It starts out seemingly unfinished, until the blank half of the canvas is filled in mentally. The abstract is, by design, the only way to accurately describe or perceive Radiohead.
It’s just barely enough. The first half is far superior, with 15 step, All I Need, Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, and Nude supplying the real emotional fix. The rest of the songs feel like they just want to have a lovely chat, not pour out their hearts.
“Videotape” is an exception, standing alone from the rest, with small digital pops and taps playing tricks on themselves and chasing behind their own rhythm until they collapse and roll down the hill. It’s the most startling composition of the lot, and serves to recontextualize the entire album. Maybe there was more to this than I thought, you’ll want to say. The song sounds like it wants to spiral out forever, but it’s cut short just as the leap over the abyss is taken. Is “In Rainbows” about being happy with what you have, not what could be?
(The limited $75 deluxe version included an 8-song, 27 minute long bonus disc of songs left off the main album. Just torrent it, since theres no other option except E-Bay.)
If you play the discs back to back in their intended order, the chords of Videotape fade into the pleasantly atmospheric puff piece of Mk1. That becomes “Down Is The New Up”, another “1984″ slogan of a song, no doubt clipped from the In Rainbows running order because it’s subject matter resembles “2+2=5″ from Hail To The Thief. Radiohead are notoriously consistent in their practice of cutting good songs from a new album because it resembles their past style in some way. The first example of this is the Bends b-sides on the My Iron Lung EP; they represented a bridge in style and songwriting between The Bends and Pablo Honey.
The rest of this disc consists of the mournful piano and minor shades the band has always specialized in, presented here in more straightforward and instantly gripping form.
The blunt prickly jangle of “Bangers And Mash” is potent as well. It could have been In Rainbows’ “Electioneering”, whether or not that’s a good thing depends on the day of the week. It’s the most prominent song on the bonus disc, making frequent concert and live video appearances.
Overall, this bonus disc has the same weight of substance as the “Airbag/How Am I Driving?” EP, with a similar trcklist structure as well. A few songs, taken individually, are even stronger than much of “In Rainbows”, though they would have shaken the album’s fragile balance if included. Radiohead didn’t want anything to distract from the primary mission of “In Rainbows”, which is…well, I have no idea. If I did, this wouldn’t be Radiohead. Now, to compulsively listen to the album a few more times to decide if I really like it or not.
