"It would be interesting to see what happened if they released the album very suddenly, with no advance warning of the release date, which I guess could happen if they went the indie route. I seem to recall Kid A not having a lot of press hoopla before it came out, but it was still on a label, so the faithful at least knew it was coming."

The above quote is from a post that I made as part of a discussion on Radiohead in a music-related online forum on September 29, 2007. We were speculating on the details about an album that we knew the band had to have been working on for a few years, but that had a scant amount of news circulating that gave any clue as to its release date. The very next day, I learned of the enigmatic British band's plan to essentially leak their own album on October 10, offering it for download on their own website, for whatever price the listener chose to pay. While I couldn't have possibly predicted the unconventional means of selling the album, I was quite amused with my uncanny timing in predicting the sneak attack.

But I'm pretty sure that you already know the story behind In Rainbows - it's one of the few rock albums in the world that managed to fire up more discussion about its method of distribution than the actual content of the album. Doing this invited a lot of praise for their willingness to let fans choose what the music was worth to them (or, in some cases, to defer payment until they could get their hands on a physical CD, while still having a way to preview the music - which is pretty much what I do with most of the music that I download anyway), but it also invited a bit of ridicule, because obviously there were going to be people who could choose never to pay for it in any form, so wouldn't the band lose money and a bit of their reputation along with it? Wouldn't it kill the sales figures when the physical CD was actually released come New Year's Day? Since I have yet to see any consistent metrics on the subject, I honestly can't tell you whether this was an effective business strategy for the band. But it generated a lot of buzz after a four-year break between albums. And it kind of threw up a middle finger in the face of the major record label machine. So I've gotta respect them for that.

But did they actually make a good album? What's the deal with Radiohead these days, anyway? They spent the better part of the 90's cultivating a fanbase with their dejected and sci-fi-infused alternative rock ramblings, only to stymie everybody's expectations with the highly experimental and difficult albums Kid A and Amnesiac, and then those experimentations and their more rock-oriented inclinations got distilled into the diverse array of musical ideas that made up 2003's Hail to the Thief. What was left for them to do after that? Well, for the first time, In Rainbows is a new Radiohead album that doesn't totally weird me out or make me wonder what the heck they were thinking upon first listen. And it's not that being baffled by such an experience is necessarily a bad thing - I'm just saying that for the first time in a while, Radiohead's experimentation is showing itself in more subtle ways, revealing an album full of surprisingly structured and tuneful songs that ends up being their most accessible album since... well, perhaps since ever. (Yeah, OK Computer will pretty much always be my favorite Radiohead album, and I'm fascinated by most of Kid A, but it literally took years for me to fully appreciate both. I'm still not convinced that I fully appreciate the latter.)

Those of you who didn't like all of the electronic tweaking that subverted the band's guitar-based sound from the 90's will probably be happy to note that there are very few tracks on this album in which the key instrument appears to have been a laptop. Personally, I sort of liked that element as long as it didn't completely kill all sense of melody and song structure, so I'm on the fence regarding this change. It almost feels like they've translated some of the aggression and the ambience that they were able to wring from the digital realm back into the acoustic realm - it's there in the minimal underpinnings of a few of In Rainbows's slower songs, as well as a few of the more groove-based tracks. You'll hear the occasional wall of noise or Johnny Greenwood guitar freakouts, but for the most part, this album is more about the construction process than what's on the roof of the building. This means that a few tracks appear to lack climaxes and "go nowhere", but it also means that a few of them have a surprisingly conventional sound, and Thom Yorke's lyrics are a bit easier to penetrate this time around. You'll hear acoustic guitars and even strings in some places, and the jazzy rhythmic explorations that the group started to explore circa Amnesiac play a role here, too, so it's a bit of a mixed bag... but every song stands out and ironically, the whole thing flows a lot better than Amnesiac or Hail to the Thief did. And they still know how to bring the creepy, even in a few songs that sound deceptively romantic at first. So in that sense, it's classic Radiohead without the band running the risk of repeating themselves.

Despite this album being "almost embarrassingly minimal" in places (I'm quoting one of the band's early descriptions of it there), and despite how seemingly accessible it is, it's still an album that has to grow on you - perhaps more so if you're an experienced Radiohead fan than if you're a newcomer. You'll be expecting it to be more mind-blowingly weird than it is, so it'll take you some time before you dig in and notice the little touches that make many of these songs stand out. I'll do what I can to walk you through and point out the highlights, but keep in mind that I'm still having a bit of trouble with the back half of it myself. Consequently, you can take my assessment of some of these songs with a grain of salt (which is not to say that you shouldn't do this on a regular basis).

15 Step
You used to be all right
What happened?
Did the cat get your tongue?
Did your string come undone?
Man, I love songs in odd time signatures. "Morning Bell" (the Kid A version, that is) had solid hook with its punchy drum rolls in 10/8 time, and this track packs a similar punch for the same reason, spewing forth a computerized rhythm that is alternately straightforward and syncopated in each pair of 5 + 5. (From what I understand, this confused a lot of audience members when the band debuted it in concert and tried to get folks to clap along.) Add to the mix some smooth, semi-jazzy electric guitar licks, an audio sample of school kids cheering, and some manic mouth sounds from the likes of Thom Yorke, and you've got yourself an instant classic before you even take a look at the lyrics. Those lyrics, by the way, seem to be in step with the patented Radiohead paranoia, but it's the way that the music keeps looking back on itself that fits so well with Thom's frustrated cry, "How come I end up where I started? How come I end up where I went wrong?"

Bodysnatchers
Check for pulse
Blink your eyes
One for yes
Two for no...
This one would be the "guitar freakout" session that I mentioned earlier - probably nothing on the order of "Paranoid Android", but still a deliciously messy bit of action that constitutes the most obvious "rock song" on the album. Thom yelps about being turned into a mindless puppet, Johnny and Ed O'Brien go all scratchy and nutso on their electric guitars, there's a short little acoustic break in the middle, and honestly this would all feel quite a bit like it was 1995 all over again if Thom wasn't reminding us that this evolution is all happening because, "It is the twenty-first century." That’s progress for you, I guess. Thom's most crass, and yet strangely apt, observation comes in the form of this choice line that I just noticed moments ago when actually reading the printed lyrics: "Your mouth moves only with someone else's hand up your @$$." Ah, good times.

Nude
Now that you've found it, it's gone
Now that you feel it, you don't
You've gone off the rails...
Those who have prided themselves on gathering the miscellaneous bits of lore about lost Radiohead songs only played at occasional concerts were hopefully thrilled to finally see this one surface on an album. It's a slow, meandering, and beautifully hopeless track with a deep, bumping bass line that they've been kicking around ever since the OK Computer days. (It was previously known as "Big Ideas", taken from the depressing opening line: "Don't get any big ideas, they're not gonna happen.") You could almost consider it a cousin to Kid A's "How to Disappear Completely", since it has a similar sense of swirling, floating detachment to it. Thom's sweet "ooh"s and the keyboard ambience in the background make it easy to overlook the harrowing lyrics, which promise that "You'll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking." The despondency here is a bit alarming, but I like the song quite a bit despite that. It's interesting to compare the album version to the way it sounded circa 10 years ago - go to YouTube and search for "radiohead nude" and you'll see what I mean. (You might want to be careful where else you go searching for "radiohead nude", though.)

Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
I'd be crazy not to follow
Follow where you lead
Your eyes, they turn me
Turn me on to phantoms
I follow to the edge of the earth, and fall off...
For those who don't know what an "arpeggio" is, it's a broken chord, played one note at a time, and let's just say that both halves of this track's title are a very good description. A cleanly picked pattern of electric guitar notes is the defining characteristic on this song, intentionally clashing with Phil Selway's unrelenting 4/4 drum pattern by sticking to its pattern of threes at all costs, so that the beginning of each only coincides on every count of 12. The layers of guitar and keyboard that eventually build up around this framework create a visual picture of a video arcade on the ocean floor, with all manner of flashing lights and synthetic tones trying to draw your attention to the myriad of machines in the room, while sharks and other creepy sea creatures swim above your head. Thom seems to be fixated on the idea of being eaten by fishes, since he mentioned this in "Optimistic" as well, and as creeped out as he seems to be by the predators circling around him, he eventually mutters, "I hit the bottom, I hit the bottom and escaped" as the music reaches its climax and Colin Greenwood‘s bass starts to sound much, much more sinister.

All I Need
I am a moth who just wants to share your light
I'm just an insect trying to get out of the night
I only stick with you because there are no others
Hey, speaking of sinister, this song seems to pretty much define the words. The bass is so low and fuzzed out here that it sounds like the type of thing that would shatter your windows if you turned it up loud enough. It's a brooding ballad that perhaps wants to masquerade as a love song, promising that "You are all I need" but doing it in such a way that Thom comes off as more of a stalker than simply a person looking for mutually enjoyable companionship. This one's got a brilliant breakdown at the end where the sound levels on the drums and cymbals sound like they're way in the red, and the keyboards flutter about and there's a hefty dose of white noise and sensory overload. It's like the sunlight comes pouring in at that moment when it first begins, but then some extremely menacing rain clouds immediately swoop in to block it out.

Faust Arp
An elephant that's in the room is
Tumbling, tumbling, tumbling
In duplicate and triplicate and plastic bags
And duplicate and triplicate
Dead from the neck up...
Wow, just when I thought Radiohead couldn't do anything to surprise me, they go and construct a fine-tuned, delicate acoustic number with only a guitar and strings. This one's rather short (just over two minutes), which disappointed me at first because I was hooking by its gentle grandeur and wanted it to unfold a bit more. But it's still beautifully performed, with Thom's subversive, frustrated poetry forcing the song's rhythm into these weird "whirlpools" where the time signature briefly converts to 3/4 before escaping the loop and going back to the usual 4/4. He appears to be expressing annoyance with an indecisive person - "I love you, but enough is enough."

Reckoner
You are not to blame for
Bittersweet distractor
Dare not speak its name
Dedicated to all human beings...
Now we've hit the point where my interest wanes a bit, and doesn't really pick up again until the album is pretty much over. Remember "Dollars and Cents" from Amnesiac? That track had an intriguingly sparse, jazzy framework to it, but it never seemed to fully get going, and that's more or less what happens here. Phil's got the right idea with the snare and cymbal heavy rhythm he lays down, and Johnny's exploring his fascination with arpeggios once again, while Thom slurs his way through pretty much the entire song in the best falsetto he can muster. It all sounds great until you realize it’s stuck in a holding pattern, and that begs the question: Should a song like this always be expected to reach a climax? Can you create a strong composition without going for the expected big, loud payoff? I'm sure that it must be theoretically possible, but Radiohead's fallen into the trap of noodling about with lyric fragments here, eventually fading the song out when they run out of incomplete thoughts. Two to three minutes of this plus some sort of a change-up near the middle or end probably would have been sufficient. They do alter the chords a bit during the "bridge", but it still all sounds a bit too lightweight to my ears.

House of Cards
The infrastructure will collapse
From carpet spikes
Throw your keys in the bowl
Kiss your husband goodnight...
And speaking of lightweight (I swear, these segues are writing themselves today!), this song's built around a set of dry guitar chords and skeletal percussion that pretty much fits the description that the title would lead you to expect. The obvious comparison here would be The Bends' "High and Dry", which has a similar effect on me - it sounds sweet and the restraint is commendable at first, but after a while it starts to feel like it's not going anywhere. Slow that down a notch and you sort of get this song, which is interesting in terms of its possible interpretation, but features a sleepy musical performance that kind of overstays its welcome. There are some nice bits - more high-pitched "oohs" from Thom and some appropriately creepy background noise give it a cavernous, lonely personality. This one almost feels like the voice of temptation, prodding a person in a troubled relationship/marriage to just throw in the towel and let the structure collapse. I'm reminded of Coldplay's "Warning Sign", because this one feels like the inverse of that song.

Jigsaw Falling into Place
The walls abandon shape
They've got a cheshire cat grin
All blurring into one
This place is on a mission...
Surprisingly enough, the album's lead single (at least here in the U.S.) shows up rather late in the game, and it's sort of a compromise between "Weird Fishes" and "Reckoner", in that it's a rather irritated-sounding rocker that starts off with a gentle arpeggio (this time acoustic) and more jazzy drums and bass before taking on more of a snarling, visceral attitude as Thom gets himself all worked up in front of the mic. All of the ingredients are there for this to be a Radiohead song that I really enjoy, but for some reason, I keep finding myself comparing it to better, earlier songs, and finding that it doesn't leave much of an impression on me despite its quick, catchy nature and its highly intriguing metaphors. (I'm realizing that the higher Thom sings, the more he slurs his words, which might be contributing to my lack of desire to really pay attention to those words. Reading the lyrics to this one is far more interesting to me than listening to the actual song.)

Videotape
When Mephistopheles is just beneath
And he's reaching up to grab me
This is one for the good days
And I have it all here in red blue green...
The album's closing track is one that took me a long time to appreciate - at first, I found the sparse piano and barely-there percussion to be off-putting, and the slightly disturbed picture it painted of the afterlife gave me unpleasant flashbacks to "Motion Picture Soundtrack", which is one of the few tracks on Kid A that I've never managed to get into. Then I took a more careful look at it, and decided that it wasn't really a man's suicide note, but rather, the playback of his life being shown before some sort of immortal judge - Thom makes reference to being at "the pearly gates" and his fear of "Mephistopheles" rising up to snatch him away. (Interestingly, looking up "Mephistopheles" in Wikipedia tells me that it's the name of a demon from a German "faust legend", which interestingly connects this song to "Faust Arp" as it refers to a man making a pact with the devil, so apparently I have a little more digging to do here.) It's sort of a testimony being left behind, an account of the good and bad in one man's life, laid bare for all the world and all of heaven to see. And while this all sounds rather morbid, there's that glimmer of hope as the song inexorably because to build up tension and Thom realizes, "No matter what happens now, I shouldn't be afraid, because I know today has been the most perfect day I've ever seen". So hey, at least he's found some sort of peace about his life ending. The drums get chopped up and spit out and otherwise messed with by the computer as the song progresses, filling more and more of the empty space as the sound begins to hemorrhage and eventually turn into an IDM-style beat that feels like one of the better moments from Thom's solo record The Eraser. The song kind of leaves you hanging when all is said and done, but it's grown on me nonetheless.

Depending on what version of In Rainbows you buy, there's an 8-song bonus disc that features material from the same recording sessions that apparently they felt didn't belong on the album. I can't speak to the quality of any of that material because I haven't heard any of it. But I will say that, for the most part, if they had to pick only 10 tracks with which to make an album that defines the current state of their evolution, they chose a pretty good set for the album proper. It's the sound of a band rediscovering their love for their instruments while not being ashamed to let their inner geeks tweak those sounds a bit. I can't quite rank it up there with OK Computer, but it sits comfortably at #3, just barely behind Kid A, due to how it complements the diversity of albums like Hail to the Thief and Amnesiac without being as, well, "scatterbrained" about it.

ALBUM WORTH:
15 Step $2
Bodysnatchers $1.50
Nude $1.50
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi $1.50
All I Need $1.50
Faust Arp $1.50
Reckoner $1
House of Cards $.50
Jigsaw Falling into Place $.50
Videotape $1
TOTAL: $12.50

Band Members:
Thom Yorke: Lead vocals, guitar, piano
Jonny Greenwood: Guitar, keyboards, piano
Ed O'Brien: Guitar, background vocals
Colin Greenwood: Bass
Phil Selway: Drums, percussion

Website: http://www.radiohead.com

Recommended: Yes

Great Music to Play While: Listening