CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Review of Radiohead, In Rainbows

Thursday, November 29, 2007

this entry brought to you by radiohead, "bodysnatchers"





A few months before In Rainbows was released on their website, I downloaded a torrent with a bunch of Radiohead concerts, and among the few concerts I grabbed was one from June 2006, which I got because I figured it would have more songs from Kid A and Hail to the Thief, which were my favorite Radiohead albums. I never got around to listening to it, however, until a few days ago, and when I did, I learned that they performed six of the ten songs off of In Rainbows, an album that, at the time, wouldn't be out until a year and a few months later. If I'd listened to the concert the day I'd downloaded it, I would've practically spoiled the album, which was one of the biggest musical events of 2007, both because it's been the first output from Radiohead since 2003's Hail to the Thief, but also because of the unusual and consumer-friendly method of distribution. Indeed, it's not a secret that the bulk of the songs off of the newest Radiohead have been floating around for quite a while in bootleg form. What's unusual about this is that Radiohead tends to write their songs in the studio and debut them live after the album has come out. I mention this because it could be interpreted that their latest release is merely a collection of songs written at different times or, if you're cynical, of a few left-overs. It doesn't feel that way when you listen to the album from beginning to the end, because thematically it's pretty compact, but it might go pretty far to explaining what it is about In Rainbows that doesn't quite feel as good to me as their previous three releases.

This isn't to say that Radiohead's latest is bad-- it's not. In fact, it's very, very good. It starts off with the head-throttling beats of the kinetic "15 Step" and goes to the fierce, sweeping riffs of "Bodysnatchers", which finds Thom Yorke declaring "I've no idea what I'm talking about!" The album's mood then drops a notch into the quiet, desolate "Nude" where Yorke suggests not getting "any big ideas/ they're not going to happen"-- and from there, the album never picks back up to the pace of the frenetic openers, though this isn't going to be a problem for any fan of Radiohead's last three moody releases. Elsewhere, Rainbows finds Yorke bittersweetly telling a lover "I only stick with you/ because there are no others" (the yearning "All I Need" with its warm yet haunting bass line) and "I don't want to be your friend/ I just want to be your lover" (the lonely, clomping "House of Cards"). At first look a lot of these songs feel like love songs, but once you dig a little deeper into the album most of them start to reveal themselves as being about problems with relationships. "I love you but enough is enough," he sings on the sweet, violin filled "Faust ARP".

It's not that there's anything specifically wrong with In Rainbows, in fact it's gorgeous and ably displays Radiohead's steady insistence of ignoring traditional song structures, and in fact, it should be noted that drummer Phil Selway shows off his incredible, solid drum chops in ways we haven't heard in years. Still, it feels like a stopgap release, much in the way Amnesiac did. The album flows well and has a very solid theme, yet something about it lacks vitality and stops it from achieving greatness, and perhaps the fact that it is an album with songs that the band took years to decide what to do with explains the feeling that something is lacking, although the songs themselves are solid. It's as if Radiohead decided to experiment by releasing an album on-line, completely skipping the CD structure, and in order to do that, they took these admittedly gorgeous but disparate songs they'd written at different times and released them as an album without shaping it into something vital. After all, song-for-song, Hail to the Thief has a couple of tracks you could ditch-- "The Gloaming" sounds too much like an idea for a song that didn't get finished, and "We Suck Young Blood" is kind of miserable, yet even though there's no songs that could be taken off Rainbows, Thief feels more vital as a whole. Still, if that's the biggest criticism that I can give the band-- that In Rainbows doesn't feel as vital as Hail to the Thief or Kid A, and that it sits comfortably next to Amnesiac, itself more of an experiment with what could be considered left-overs from previous recording sessions fashioned into a gorgeous stopgap album-- then that gives credence to just how great this band is and deserving of its critical adoration: even the album meant more of as an experiment for the music business is still imminently worth listening to.
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with love from CRS @ 7:39 AM 

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