In Rainbows
W.A.S.T.E
The day after Radiohead released its new album In Rainbows—the long-awaited follow up to 2001’s Hail to the Thief—Gigwise reported that it had already been downloaded 1.2 million times. According to industry polls, most of the downloaders had voluntarily paid an average of between two and ten dollars. This didn’t include those who had bought the deluxe-edition discbox for eighty. With no middle-man to soak up the revenue, you do the math.
It’s official: Radiohead has beaten the machine. The industrial one, at least. And being Radiohead, they were clever enough to use another machine (ok, computer) to do it. The thought that these ironies are the result of carefully structured planning is kind of frightening. Then again, (it’s hard not to feel) Radiohead had to be the band to make this move. Quite simply, no other rock group has attacked the struggle between the isolated individual and the impersonal forces of automation as aggressively. More importantly, no band has staged that tension on as many different levels of its sound. The most essential of those stagings was always the battle between lead singer Thom Yorke’s choir-schooled falsetto and his band’s monolith of noise, which could either hoist that wail skyward or rush over it as a merciless, overwhelming tide. In most of Radiohead’s best early songs (“Fake Plastic Trees”) both of those things happened within a matter of minutes. The effect was as exhilarating as it was exhausting.
Then something strange happened. Yorke had a well-chronicled nervous breakdown seven months into the OK Computer tour, and one of its primary symptoms—a complete disgust with the sound of his own voice—practically defined the new direction signaled by Kid A. Because he couldn’t stand to hear it, Yorke simply instrumentalized that voice, completely re-purposing his singing in Radiohead’s music—not as something to be set against his band, but as another sound-making tool. Likewise, many of his lyrics began to serve less as reflections on the world than as capsules to accommodate desired sounds. Simon Reynolds (to whom Yorke described all this in a 2001 interview) brilliantly described this as “literally voicing (rather than articulating) contemporary feelings of numbness, impotence, and paralysis.” In other words, Yorke turned himself into what he was being made to feel like: a machine. That vital tension between voice and noise wasn’t eliminated, but horrifyingly solved. The peak moments of Radiohead’s new music became beautiful but disquieting co-becomings of the body and 21st century technology.
Radiohead deserved the credit they got.
They had re-imagined the aesthetic possibilities of rock and roll. But those innovations came at a price: By retreating from his singing, Yorke had also retreated from his knee-buckling sense of melody.
Yes, In Rainbows is an album about artistic freedom. You can feel that. Without a label looking over its shoulder, the band had the freedom to flesh these songs out carefully over time, and the results are evident in music—filled with spidery guitar lines, gorgeous, terrifying swells, pneumatic melodies, and slinky beats—whose ambition is contained in its masterful subtlety.
In many cases, the process of development took years, which means that there are also some great insights here into Radiohead’s evolution: Essentially, “All I Need” is a genetic hybrid of two entirely different pieces of music—Pablo Honey’s “Thinking about You” and Kid A’s “Climbing the Walls”—which deal with the same classic Yorke theme: the yearning man who can’t get inside the periphery of his love object’s vision. But as its quiet instrumental brushstrokes slowly burgeon into a low-riding storm cloud, you realize what a sonic monster this band has become. Likewise, “15 Steps”—a puzzle-box of glitchy beats, claps, cash-machine whirs, and sinewy guitar—sounds like a sketch from Yorke’s The Eraser applied to the full-band formula.
But if In Rainbows mainly represents Radiohead’s victory over accelerated technology—of the physical over the prosthetic—that theme is best expressed in the return of that weaponized voice as the dominant force in their sound. Couched elegantly in the band’s arrangements, Yorke’s singing anchors this album, and the melodies he carries are strikingly beautiful: Take “Reckoner,” where the vocals breeze like smoke through a blue metallic jungle of poly-rhythms, vapor-thin guitar cycles, and Johnny Greenwood string-whispers. Take “Videotape,” in which Yorke alternately floats words above the music and locks them to the tune’s gently plodding piano. Take “Nude,” which leaves him practically to his own devices, crooning silkily over a light throb of bass.
The resurgence of the body in Radiohead’s art also accounts for some of the sexiest songs the band has ever made (“Nude,” “House of Cards”): What a thing to hear Thom Yorke sing a line like “I don’t want to be your friend/I just wanna be your lover.”
Yorke hasn’t escaped his paranoia. With In Rainbows, though, Radiohead seems to have mined something totally unexpected out of modern anxiety: something almost like joy. “It’s the 21st century,” Yorke howls in the snarling guitar- rocker “Bodysnatchers.” “I’m alive!”
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