Hail To The Thief

Honestly, I didn't have much expectations of the new album as I've downloaded the bulk of the new songs which Radiohead played live in Spain last August. I had it all figured to be Radiohead's weakest album ever.

The songs sounded way too similiar and draggy in the live bootleg. However, the only exception was the lead single "There There" which I thought was a continuation of Kid A's "Optimistic" with the tribal-sounding drums and shards of chords crashing all over. Lyrically, it's still all Thom Yorke up to his old pet topic with his mournful refrain at the outro of the song: "We are just accidents/ Waiting to happen".

The neurosis and paranoia of The Bends and OK Computer born out of urban living had given way to new muses on songs like "Knives Out" on 2001's Amnesiac. Fear of flying and phobias of stuck in lifts and getting into accidents have warped into Yorke 's new pet topic of cannabalism which he further explores in this new offering in the dirgey piano ballad "We Suck Young Blood". The band actually featured handclaps in the song itself. When was the last time I've actually heard handclaps used as a production trick in a Radiohead song? Hmmmm .... never....

So, it seems that Thom Yorke has redressed the gap between his muses lyrically. Moreover, that does not end just there. Musically, the band seems to have merged their love for pioneering electronic bands like Can and Kraftwerk with their spiraling and wiry guitars more successfully this time round. Sounding far more cohesive than what they have done on both Kid A and Amnesiac, it would be hard to imagine a future Radiohead album without the union of electronic bleeps and drone laying alongside guitars. Carrying on in the vein of such a trend would be the standout track, "A Punchout At The Wedding" with the casading piano propped by the "Idioteque"-like scatterbeats.

Another track which caught my attention was the closing track, "A Wolf At The Door". Thom Yorke had hardly ever gone into a stream-of-consciousness ranting style in any Radiohead songs; ranting, yes but with so many words that crammed into a single bar is definitely new. As all fans would know, Yorke often stretches the melody for most of Radiohead songs over a single word or syllable, just to let the tune breathe and hammer itself into the listener's consciousness.

In my opinion, this latest offering has swung the band back on track after the mishap of the previous album with very few dry moments to spare. 9/10