Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 10/10/07
Label: Download

Given the unholy brouhaha with added hoopla that accompanied the release of Radiohead's seventh studio album, surely no one can possibly be unaware of Wednesday's international address. One imagines even mad old Doris from next door, incapable of remembering her own address or the whereabouts of her long dead husband, had a gnarly hand poised to download, as she updated her blog and set-up a bit-rate protest group on Facebook. With all the fuss spawned by the daring/dubious decision to go it alone and allow Dave Public to set their own price, there is actually some music to consider from perhaps our greatest band.

Happily, "In Rainbows" is pretty, pretty good. Apparently there are some that still hanker for the days of "The Bends". In fact, Yahoo! Music recently encountered one alarming individual who still ranks "Pablo Honey" as the band's one true classic. As if it were not now glaringly obvious, that band isn't coming back and neither is this "OK Computer: The Blackberry Years". What we're dealing with here is a band now at ease in its enormously gifted, sonically boundless terrain, where man meets machine and beautiful love ensues. "In Rainbows" is calm, concise, lean, fluid, organic and unburdened, notwithstanding the singer, of course.

As such, it does not suffer from the same paranoid appetite for rewired electronic skronk as infected predecessors "Amnesiac", "Hail To The Thief" or the peerless "Kid A". Crucially, neither does it contain anything as stadium-sating as, say, "There There" or "2+2=5", preferring to deal in simple melodies, warped by strange aural infrastructure, where atmosphere trumps hooks. While this doesn't exactly deliver a plethora of jaw-dropping, wow moments, there are certainly three, at beginning, middle and end. Opener "15 Step" throws a Warp-inspired, crunching beats dummy, sliding into a sublime jazzy swirl and a bravura closing information overload fired by fierce, skittering digital tap-dancing.

Even better is "All I Need", which lifts the lonesome drum loop from Boards Of Canada's "In A Beautiful Place", adds austere Eno synths, before a liquid piano flourish and wave after wave of cymbal crashes collide ecstatically. "Videotape", like "Kid A" before it, delivers Thom Yorke to the album's conclusion in a box, a deathly executioner's march complete with mutant percussion as the infinitely tormented singer groans at the doors of "the pearly gates." Arguably, at no point here does Yorke truly conjure anything with the same polemic power or leper fear as "Idiotique" or "Harrowdown Hill" from solo album "The Eraser". Instead, we're in the rather unfortunate position of confronting a collapsing "House Of Cards" and then a "Jigsaw Falling Into Place".

No matter, because this is a band with talent to burn, their vaulting ambition the spark, as each exploration of this album reveals more and more. Notably, "Bodysnatchers" is a delicious, careering but controlled wreck of twisted guitar metal, "Nude", like "Pyramid Song" before it, a ghostly, shimmering slice of lavish romantic doom bathed in lustrous strings, which are again deployed on the gentle comedown of "Faust Arp", the drifting orchestration seemingly sampled from a lost Nick Drake epiphany. Only in time will it become clear where "In Rainbows" 'fits" in the Radiohead canon. However, even with a bit-rate of 160kbps, they still sound out of this world.

    by Ben Gilbert