I am sitting in front of my computer late at night. Alone. With headphones on. It's the best place I can imagine to fully absorb the various sonic wrinkles woven deeply into the fabric of any given Radiohead release. Occasionally it occurs to me that this is how the band intended its music to be received: a nation of millions absorbing the 1's and 0's of its codebase in isolation, listener by listener, like some sort of slow-motion domino topple.
Jason Evans
Radiohead: good people with the best intentions making the same music theyve made before.
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RADIOHEAD
Hail to the Thief
Capitol/EMI, $18.98
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I idly catch myself wondering how much better it might be if I were properly zonked on whatever it is that's required to open oneself up to all the little pointillist pain pricks that occasionally, and violently, poke through the surface of the music. Bear in mind that I'm only two tracksless than five minutes totalinto the band's latest opus, and already singer Thom Yorke is hard at work trying to disturb my inner peace. And doing a damn fine job of it, too.
The song in question, "Sit Down, Stand Up," is built on a roiling piano foundation with bells tinkling like broken glass around the melody line, when Yorke's quavering voice begins its series of disembodied militaristic commands: "Sit down. Stand up. Walk into the jaws of hell. We can wipe you out anytime. Sit down. Stand up." The tension builds around a slowly rising drum roll while Yorke wails behind the steadily expanding shower of noise, finally crashing into a double-time bridge that repeats the phrase "the raindrops" a total of 47 times (the vocal equivalent of sit-ups performed under duress) before the whole thing comes to an abrupt halt.
Somehow, I can't help but feel we've been here before.
THERE IS BOTH GOOD and bad in being one of the longest-running acts of your generation. The upside is that with each successive album, there is a built-in fanbase for your work, one that will enthusiastically lap up all but the most turgid droppings from the creative table. The downside is that the mathematical probability of repeating yourself in some crucially destructive fashion becomes greater with each passing year.
And this is my primary grievance with Hail to the Thief (out June 10), Radiohead's seventh full-length release over the course of its 15 years . It's not a terrible album; far from it. I suspect that fans of the band's early work will find much to love about the way in which producer Nigel Godrich has taken pains to place guitars and drums so centrally in the album's mix. In fact, it's nearlybut not quitethe "return to rock" and/or form promised by various and sundry over the course of the five years since Radiohead released their last album of true artistic merit, 1997's OK Computer, the Gen-X set's very own Dark Side of the Moon and the high-water mark by which the rest of the group's work will be forever judged.
But even when handicapped against this almost insurmountable standard, some very real flaws remain evident on Thief; chief among these are the disturbing signs of a band that sounds like it's marking time until its next great idea. Having already made mincemeat of fan expectations on the electronic- influenced experiments Kid A and Amnesiac (albums released a year apart but drawn from the same chilly, weirded-out recording sessions that nearly tore the band asunder), by now there seems little else Radiohead can do to truly surprise anyone, aside from perhaps writing a polka-inspired rock opera about the hidden political merits of George W. Bush. "Tweedle Dubya," anyone?
You get the picture: This is a band caught dawdling in the fierce tailwinds of a continental drift, a group that appears to have given up the quest for "challenge" in exchange for letting its past work float it along on the breeze of momentum. How else to explain a song as lovely as "Sail to the Moon," a piano ballad that would easily qualify as one of the most stunning things the group has ever recorded, if it hadn't already done the same damn thing two years ago with Amnesiac's "Pyramid Song." Even the lyrical conceits of the two are the same: On "Pyramid Song," Yorke imagined an underwater world where former lovers, black-eyed angels, and a heaven-bound rowboat would whisk him away from an earthly existence loaded with uncertainty and fear, whereas on "Moon" he simply makes his wish for redemption less allegorical: "Maybe you'll be president/But know right from wrong/Or in the flood you'll build an ark/And sail us to the moon." Even if you tried to build a case that he's stringing along a narrative intended to thread multiple works together and, frankly, you can'tit just sounds lyrically lazy (if nevertheless beautiful to behold at first listen).
Hail to the Thief abounds with such transgressions. The album's final track, "A Wolf at the Door," is perhaps the worst of the lot, starting as it does with an interpolation of the carefully picked ascending/descending guitar chords the Beatles made so indelible on "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" and pairing it with Yorke's best free-associative Dylan impersonation à la "Subterranean Homesick Blues." Yorke rap-sings his way through a litany of paranoid-android complaints against society's class barriers and the slow creep of modernizationall while ripping off Monty Python ("dragging out your dead") in the bargain. It's a track that's stunning in its way, as brazen a borrowing spree as I've heard from this quintet in all its time together, up to and including the obvious Pixies/Nirvana rip-off "Creep" so many years ago.
