Review: Radiohead - In Rainbows

Between September 30, 2007 and October 10, 2007, I spent 240 hours quaking in anticipation for the new Radiohead album In Rainbows to reach my inbox. As I’ve been an h-core Radiohead fan since my sister first played me The Bends, I had come to associate their album releases as significant events in my life. Leaving aside the revolutionary means of distribution, what was most fascinating for me about In Rainbows is that releasing the album this way ensured what may be the first collective musical experience in my lifetime. On October 10, 2007, people from all walks of life turned to their computers to have their minds collectively blown.
Aside from the cryptic messages left on their blog, Dead Air Space, the last we heard from Radiohead as a band was just over four years ago with the release of Hail to the Thief, a decent album, which nonetheless sounded a little bit tired. In the period between albums, Radiohead refrained from signing with a record label, took time off and took to the road, previewing all ten tracks that would eventually end up on In Rainbows. The album contains all the elements of Radiohead we’ve come to know and love over the more experimental stages of their career: Thom Yorke’s haunting crooning, reverberating electronic blips and hums, white noise distortion…and wait a minute… was that a guitar? And a drum? And an ORCHESTRA!?! Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! For the first time in years, my favorite band sounds like a band.
The album opens with the lyrics, “How come I end up where I started? How come I end up where I belong?” The line seems to subconsciously refer at once to Radiohead’s return to their sonic roots and the evolution their music has made over the last decade. In Rainbows rocks and rolls in exhilarating and unexpected ways, the perfect amalgamation of Radiohead’s lost days of straightforward rock with their less-accessible forays into the music weaned from technology.
The album is replete with moments that invert expectations, as the songs build and deconstruct themselves from inside out. The opening electronic scratch and drum sequence in “15 Step” teases us into thinking Yorke and company are going the way of Kid A and Amnesiac, but soon the scratch dissipates, giving way to Jonny Greenwood’s soulful guitar line. “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” crescendos monumentally into a modern symphony as the arpeggios weave in and out of the intricate drumming and transcendent harmonies.” It sounds like it could belong on Ok Computer. Listen to “Let Down” and then “Weird Fishes” back to back to understand the progress they’ve made as a band. In spite of the dissenters, Radiohead had to make Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief in order to be able to write the songs on In Rainbows.
Perhaps the most remarkable accomplishment of the album is the return to pure, unadulterated melody. Rarely is Yorke’s voice filtered beyond recognition. A personal favorite, “All I Need” centers itself on the sincere refrain of what may be Yorke’s most uncomplicated lyrics to date, “You’re all I need / You’re all I need.” The oldest track on the record, appearing sometime in the 1990s, “Nude,” begins as a Bjork-circa-Medulla mermaid song, but the doubled voices soon drop away, leaving Yorke doing his doleful, inspired version of r&b, singing about woes of alienation with the lines, “And now that you’ve found it – it’s gone / and now that you’ve felt it – you don’t.” “Reckoner,” indulges Radiohead’s ability to create cinematic atmospheric pieces à la “How to Disappear Completely,” and “Exit Music (for a Film),” yet doesn’t take itself as seriously, reveling instead in its own inner harmonies. This album is definitely the sexiest Thom Yorke and crew have ever sounded.
In Rainbows is also the best of all of Radiohead’s beautifully messed up worlds. One of the reasons many listeners and fans may have been turned off in recent years is that all of the blipping, buzzing, and whirring can come off as noise pollution. Instead, here Radiohead extracts moments of their electronic experimentation to use as accents instead of overwhelming the songs. Songs like “Bodysnatchers” and “House of Cards” recall the more sonically distant moments of Amnesiac, but the band remains grounded.
Finally, the album closer, “Videotape,” finds Yorke singing, “This is my way of saying goodbye / Because I can’t do it face to face.” As I reluctantly retreat into the post-album silence, I realize that Radiohead has come full circle, not back to where they started, but to a new and exciting vantage point over the full range of their talent and experimentation. The repetitive piano and continuously collapsing drumbeat of “Videotape” provide an appropriate and steady march away from the tremendously moving masterpiece that is In Rainbows.