While it's clearly a shift towards making music identifiable as that
of rockband, let's make this much clear: that doesn't clarify things
in the slightest. This may be Radiohead strapping on guitars more
often, and they may be walking the smack they've been talking, about
"having fun" and authoring "joyous" songs and such. But such joy and
fun have hardly come across on the disc after giving the
full-stop/multi-titled shtick of Hail to the Thief the
play-then-play-again spins that an anticipated album deserves in that
first week. My first week hailing to its sounds has been rather like
a week spent trying to divine a path through a haunted forest strewn
with spiderwebs — that image, of course, one that that video for
"There there. (The Boney King of Nowhere.)" has imprinted on minds so
stylishly that so many similarly-toned tracks herein conjure up
similar visions. The super-spookiness of "We Suck Young Blood. (Your
Time Is Up.)" — cultivated by a piano (thumping the same
minor-key block-chords it did for about half of Amnesiac),
Thom Yorke's wan warbling washed out to a ghostly chorus, and more
handclaps than an Architecture in Helsinki show — arouses a
spectral air that unsettles through haunting effect. That, though, is
one of the songs that stands out from the guitar-wrangling numbers
herein; the clarity of this spookiness only implies fogs and mists,
rather than eventuating them through layers laid on as thick as pea
soup. So, like, rather than being a return to climbing up walls, all
that these rediscovered Radiohead guitars we've been hearing about
actually mean, when you get down to playing the record, is that
things sound so much more dense than they did on either of those
sublime twin-set set-pieces Kid A and Amnesiac. Where
songs on said records were often — like the abstract-electro
gear that inspired them — defined by things as simple as a
texture, a tone, or an ambience, this sixth album is not nearly so
Zen-like. Such notions of simplicity spiral out into an intricacy
woven with complexity; mixes here try their best to try and define
and delineate songs that are, by nature, opaque. There may be more
guitars, the drums might be louder, and Yorke's vocals may've been
left sounding cleaner. But this has not meant that Radiohead have
retreaded back down this path-less-taken in retreat to their rockband
past, to the time when their first three albums essentially found
their brow beholden with the crowned mantle of being, well, the new
U2. Where their past two discs made clean-lined pop music that
happened to be oft fashioned from the crunchy digitalia of the laptop
set, Hail to the Thief makes sprawling, overwrought, unkempt
rock music — songs misshapen through the caprice of instinct,
rhythms veering in ways more abstract than abstracted, this wandering
path much more fraught with danger than that trod by the albums
regarded as being off in some impenetrable wilderness by so much of
the rockist massive. If you twist perspective enough, this could mean
that this is Radiohead's most subversive stroke yet; that, while
they're aping past tone and selling it as a return to anthemicism,
Yorke and Co. have instead gone even further down their darkened
path, ever closer to the yawning abyss that will one day swallow them
whole; and that luring OK Computer fans this deep into this
darkness is akin to the kind of pernicious tricks turned by witches
in gingerbread houses.
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