In Rainbows, Radiohead · 03/10/2008 09:44 PM
When I first picked this up, I was surprised. Is this what happens when a successful band sheds the pressures of a major label? Alternatively, I entertained the idea that the reason Radiohead offered the album to their fans for however much they wanted to pay for it was because the band wasn’t confident that the album actually had value. Luckily, I stuck it out through a few listens and realized why this album was widely regarded as one of the best of 2007. The album, as it turns out, is about forty minutes of really good music. Why did it take me several listens to final get it and appreciate this album? The first forty seconds really turned me off; the album opens with a fake beat, an electrical noise, and Thom Yorke’s falsetto. It’s not as though I can’t appreciate those elements—there’s no avoiding them on this record or many of Radiohead’s other releases—but that particular combination is caustic and, frustratingly, it temporarily set the mood for the whole album for me. Several listens later, however, I found that the actual mood of the album is found elsewhere: in the anxious energy of “Bodysnatchers,” the orchestral leanings of “Faust Arp,” and the gentle rolling of “House of Cards.” It’s not a high-energy rock release from start to finish despite what the single “Bodysnatchers” or a trip to Barnes and Noble where you’ve undoubtedly heard “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” might indicate. Like any good Radiohead release, the album has a pensive quality to it. “Nude,” for example, comes across as Radiohead’s take on the lullaby with Thom Yorke singing as sweetly as can, “So don’t get any big ideas / they’re not going to happen. / You’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking.” It’s a brilliantly composed track, even if it did take a few tries to figure out why it was I should go back to sleep. The song borders on political, but finds that skilled rhetoric that uses whatever’s already in your head to sort out the message. The album closes in a way that reminds me of the beginning, without the hackneyed styling of a (bad) concept album. Writing about this now, I realize that “Videotape” helps me understand and almost appreciate the caustic texture with which the album opens. Unlike the noise and artificiality of the album’s opening sound, In Rainbows closes with a real piano and a real drum rat-a-tat, yet this sound is unpleasant too, like that of distant gunfire. In Rainbows is a gem of an album. I just hope that post-label Radiohead has the self-promotion acumen to produce more records of this quality. 
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I like this album a lot, although I have to say that I like Thom Yorke’s solo album better.
— The Girl 03/17/2008 09:09 PM #