October 16, 2007

Radiohead
In Rainbows

Pat Smith | contributing writer
psmith4@smcvt.edu

Normally when a major band releases its newest album, the biggest question everyone has for a friend is, “So what do you think of it?” For Radiohead’s In Rainbows the first question is “How much did you pay for it?” The follow up could be, “Was that a fair price?” In my case, I paid a single pound, and feel a tad guilty.

Released online as a digital download 10 days after announcing it was ready, In Rainbows has been seen as shot across the bow of record labels. But fortunately for Radiohead fans, the content of the album is much greater than an experiment with democratizing music consumption.  
    
The two opening tracks set up expectations for the rest of the album, even if they sound distinctly different from what follows. Opener “15 Steps” seems a continuation of the Hail to The Thief sound, with electronic drums and muffled, rock-styled guitar play. It’s an upbeat opening track and is immediately followed by another, deeper throwback. “Bodysnatchers” sounds like it's being played by a Radiohead that has been listening to Pablo Honey over and over, thinking, “You know, we did a lot right there, let’s see what we can make it sound like now.” All in all, the first two tracks show that Radiohead isn’t taking brand new steps with In Rainbows so much as they are taking everything they have done so far and making it work together.

The transition from “Bodysnatchers” to “Nude” is strange and disconcerting at first. The spectral electronic moans, barely recognizable as a human voice, take the listener to Thom Yorke’s emphasizing of his vocals as if it’s another instrument as he ooo’s along. The track settles into what becomes the dominant mood of the album and one of the standouts.

Perhaps more important than the effect of their previous albums coming together is the influence of specific members and their solo work. Thom Yorke is, like so many lead singers, one of the most well-known members of the band. His solo project Eraser is all over In Rainbows, the slow and mellow pacing of the songs, with occasional pick-up. Guitarist Johnny Greenwood has been doing work scoring films, and the cinematic influence plays throughout the new album. Writing music videos, movie scenes, to accompany tracks would not be the most difficult task.
    
The arrangements of each song cannot be described without the review cliché: intricate and meticulous. It’s never clear when piano will come in, when it will go, when strings will swell, when they will quietly hide in the background, when they will be absent. The guitar comes and goes, tries new ideas within the same song, bells appear. When nearly everything will be electronic, or when it’s time for only “real” instruments. Though never apparent beforehand, after a listen or two, the composing can’t be imagined any other way. Contrasting this is Phil Selway’s drums. During many parts, his drumming comes more loosely, as if he were brought this tightly composed song and asked to jam along. It’s a testament to both his drumming and to the album’s arrangement that this sound works wonderfully throughout.

The easiest way to describe In Rainbows is pretty. Thom and the rest somehow manage to make lyrics like “I get eaten by the worms” sound beautiful. Yet that prettiness and beauty doesn’t hold together. Even at the peak, there is something…well…off. The album as a whole is, much like the early transition between “Bodysnatchers” and “Nude”, disconcerting. It feels like the album Radiohead needed to make, the progression of their work and sound, but something just isn’t right.

Which brings us round to the much-discussed paranoia of the band, of Thom, and that becomes the explanation for the feeling of something, somewhere, somehow in the beauty, being wrong. On In Rainbows, the paranoia is more intimate, closer than before. On “Faust Arp,” we are allowed to hear the counting off to begin the track, not a normal Radiohead move. On “House of Cards,” Thom sings more sensical and personal lyrics than anyone is used to from him - “I don’t want to be your friend/I just want to be your lover.”

Yet, past all that, there is unease, the temporariness of a house of cards, the ease with which it all collapses. In the end, each track’s lyrics bring out this same sense of uneasiness. An inner tearing, incompleteness, a lack of a whole, reflected in lines like “It’s all wrong/It’s all right/It’s all wrong” and “Because we separate/it ripples our reflections.” The shifts in each track, from very slow to very jumpy back and forth, heighten this discomfort. The intense, intimate unease works its way out to construct of the album, it doesn’t feel like a perfectly assembled whole, but something incomplete.

The closer, “Videotape” raises this contradiction of beauty and painful tugging of the gut that something is terribly wrong to new heights. At the same time as it is at its most beautiful, “Videotape” comes with terrifying doom. Opening with the theme of death, the song lets Thom sing and hum over a ghostly piano and slow but unrelenting bass drum. Later, the drum adds a roll, marching the music along. In the sense of fright, paranoia, and beauty, in the combination of band growth and individual growth, and in the detailed and complex arrangements, In Rainbows is a Radiohead album that won’t necessarily win new fans, but will fit right into what any existing fans could want.