Sample The Web

Let me just start by stating that this is a
very good album. I’ve been listening to it practically non-stop
since I purchased it and it hasn’t become tiresome and I keep
discovering new things I like about it. It’s still not as good as The
Bends which I consider to be, for me, Radiohead’s best album,
as every track works on its own and adds to the entirety of the album as a
whole–(something that I think OK
Computer justfalls short of, and both Amnesiac
and Kid
A failed to do.
These latter two albums seemed to be partial albums that lacked something,
and needed each other to form a complete whole, or at least
needed the following
EP of live recordings to provide a complete picture of the aesthetics
of these works.) With Hail to the Thief, Radiohead has
moved away somewhat from the highly polished walls of sound that permeate
these albums; the walls of sound are still there but they are
syncopated by some of the raw analog toughness of Pablo
Honey, and for
the first time since Pablo Honey, there are evident echoes of
influence within the individual songs. “2 + 2 = 5″—the first
track on the new album, for example— begins with an approach to the
melodious walls of sound familiar to Radiohead fans, but this is
disturbed somewhat and distributed, by a ticking fast beat that sounds
very akin to the noise a CD makes when it has a scratch along its
surface that syncopates the music in an oddly artificial way. This was
off-putting the first time I listened to the song, but after several
runs through it begins to make a sort of disharmonious sense to the
melodies of the album. This song progresses until the end section of
the song burst forth in a very eratic explosion of singing that sounds
very akin to Eddie Vedders rantings on Pearl Jam’s Yield.This was
perhaps the oddest thing that continues to scratch at the back of my
brain: Many of the songs on this wonderful album have
segments that sound as if they have been borrowed in style and form from
the albums of many of Radiohead’s contemporary musicians (and a few
of their predecessors). The most notable is this first track and
“Myxomatosis,” where the sudden removal of all music save the drums and
the vocals are combined with a very syncopated singing of “I (pause) don’t
(pause) know (pause) why…” that sounds almost identical to one
of R.E.M.’s most recent songs. And these musical allusions are not alone,
as there are whispers of Pink Floyd and others throughout
the album and these allusions would seem to syncopate the album nearly as
much as the odd dissonance that Radiohead masterfully incorporates
from time to time alongside the steady drum machine beats that sound all
too familiar as the basic ramba and other various pre-programmed
sounds that can be found eminating from the most common electronic
keyboards purchased at RadioShack. With this album, I think Radiohead is
saying as much with the sounds they use as they normally say in their
anti-commercialism lyrics. My only real complaint aobut the album is
that it wasn’t to be found on the iTunes Apple store, so I had to actually
swing by a Best Buy to grab my copy. Go check it out.