Radiohead: Hail To The Thief

Hail To The Thief

Best song: Myxomatosis

Worst song: We Suck Young Blood

Overall grade: 5

Remember when Radiohead announced their followup to ‘OK Computer’, and it could have gone one of two ways – either safely carried on in the direction of that one, a carbon copy, not breaking any new ground but sure to satisfy most people who fell in love with the original? Or the sharp left turn towards electronica they did take, which rebranded them forever as experimentalists and innovators? Well, if this had been the immediate sequel to ‘OK Computer’, I feel like it would have been the clone of that album everyone was expecting, and maybe things would have turned out very differently.

See, for the first time this album feels like Radiohead – there’s something of a formula at work. Take ‘Sail To The Moon’, for example. It’s quite a beautiful song but it is their classic haunting ballad, similar to those which have appeared on every album previous. Also, almost every song here follows the pattern of starting quiet and sparse and building up to a bigger, faster, almost angrier sound near the end. It would be interesting to hear more songs do the opposite. If you, too, would like to hear songs do the opposite… don’t look here.

That said, I don’t find this album unnecessary in the Radiohead canon. Lyrically it might well be the strongest thing they’ve done yet. They’re still partly political, partly fearful and partly cryptic, and lyric writing has certainly never been an area where Yorke has struggled, I just like these ones particularly. (I have a desktop background picture that’s a wordcloud just comprised of quotes from Hail to the Thief, like ‘Go and tell the king that the sky is falling in when it’s not’.)

There’s a great disjointed rhythm and hopeless atmosphere at the start of opening track ‘2 + 2 = 5’, and I also really like the effect later in the song with the sped up vocals. ‘Backdrifts’ creates similar effects, it’s like the song equivalent of a strobe light, very jerky and off kilter. And these two songs effectively demonstrate the one real difference between this album and its predecessors, which is that this is less abstract. Written in the run-up to the 2004 election with its anti-Bush title, nothing about this claims to be a hypothetical world. This is real, about things that are happening now, and we can’t even pretend to escape it.

‘Go To Sleep’ is different to the two I mentioned, though. It’s another with a great opening, swathed in those wafting acoustic guitars that make it kinda folky, but with a dark edge. Sadly, as it continues, it wanders into more generic territory. ‘Where I End And You Begin’ happily does not suffer from this problem. It has a truly brilliant section where the industrial rock-style backing is contrasted by Thom’s high, soaring vocals; a very exciting combination. I might listen to the album just for that little bit.

But what’s with the handclaps on ‘We Suck Young Blood’? What’s with anything about that song? It drives me insane and not in a good way. It’s not pleasant to listen to at all, and its point (about Hollywood taking over the minds of easily-led young people) could be made much better another way. I much prefer the more electronic-based ‘The Gloaming’, a melody deconstructed to the point of being unrecognisable, containing the line ‘We will suck you down to the other side’ sung with enough apathy to make it incredibly creepy.

One of the more traditional songs, ‘There There’, deserves a mention because I like the way the very dense instrumentation and the melodic vocal line are separate near the beginning but fuse to become one as the song goes on. Juxtapositions like this one are one of the things this album does well: for example, the pairing of melodicism and dissonance on songs such as my favourite, ‘Myxomatosis’. The only way I can think of to describe it is that none of the instruments sound like they’re exactly in the right place, making it unpredictable and all the more thrilling for it. Positioned in a place where most albums have their weakest tracks, it’s always a welcome surprise.

And then we finish things off with the emotional but not particularly challenging ‘Scatterbrain’ and its opposite number ‘A Wolf at the Door’. Of the two I prefer the second. On an album where nothing really flows, it fits right in, because I can’t imagine it ever flowing with anything. It’s strange, not a traditional closer, and doesn’t end the album neatly, kind of reminding you of the imperfections of everything (after all, how many things in real life end neatly?)

At this point in their career I’m not sure Radiohead were capable of making a bad album. Even if they’d tried, what they’d come up with probably would have been incredibly interesting. But instead, they played it safe. And while, as you can see from the rating, that’s not necessarily a bad thing; it’s definitely not a good thing either.