“I’d be crazy not to follow / Follow where you lead,” mews Thom Yorke on “Weird Fishes / Arpeggi,” the fourth track from Radiohead’s long-awaited seventh album In Rainbows. It’s a lyric that may pertain to the innovative band’s worshippers.
The British fivesome’s oeuvre is one of the most perplexing, enrapturing, and downright weird aural journeys in the past two decades. Yorke, a timid, tussled Brit with a lazy eye and an ironic admiration for Jim Morrison (see Pablo Honey‘s barnstormer “Anyone Can Play Guitar”), flourished into the most revered mad scientist of modern rock.
He and his mates, particularly guitar slingers Jonny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien, have been crowned the Lennon/McCartney/Harrisons of their time, and the same amount of blind praise the Beatles received is being heaped upon Radiohead.
Electro-centered album Kid A (2000) was not mind-shattering; it was just a deliberate departure from the layered, challenging rock ‘n’roll of Pablo Honey (1993), The Bends (1995), and OK Computer (1997). Kid‘s puzzling counterpart of B-sides, Amnesiac (2001), proved that Yorke could essentially yawn over Casio piano-produced beats, run it through a Mellotron, and call it art. The incessant adulation for these electronic experiments countered Yorke’s own lyrics from 1993’s “Thinking About You”: “These people aren’t your friends / They’re paid to kiss your feet.”
And now fans don’t have to pay at all to hear In Rainbows. In what could be a stroke of marketing genius (or a ploy bound to bite them in the wallet), Radiohead have allowed listeners to choose their cost to download the record. Brick-and-mortar stores began carrying the album proper with bonus tracks in December, but the delivery of the digital files is indicative of the future of music.
Yet In Rainbows doesn’t offer much as an aural evolution for Radiohead. The audience is first blasted by “15 Step,” a ruddy dance track akin to Björk’s “Earth Intruders” with a little slide-guitar noodling thrown in. Whereas “Nude” is gorgeous in its solemnity, “All I Need” is like a grubby, unloved track off Hail to the Thief (2003). “Faust ARP,” too reminiscent of “Exit Music (For a Film)” plods along, despite Yorke’s request to the listener to “wakey wakey.”
There is a smattering of songs that was worth the four-year wait, such as the ebullient groover “Bodysnatchers” and the heartrending closing ballad “Videotape.” In the piano-laden dirge, Yorke talks of goodbye, of death, of Mephistopheles grasping at his feet. Perhaps it’s signaling the end of the music industry as we know it.
– Melissa Bobbitt
Radiohead: www.inrainbows.com