Last night, Radiohead eschewed the music industry status quo with the release of its seventh studio effort, In Rainbows. At 2:30 a.m. Eastern Time, fans received an email from the ever-mysterious W.A.S.T.E. Industries (Radiohead’s official fan club) with only a brief message and a link to download the new album. After deciding themselves how much they would like to pay for the album, fans across the globe all pushed “play.”
For the first time, you can now download a Radiohead album on BU’s servers and not have to worry about the RIAA knocking on your door. Plus, it’s a masterpiece; so go ahead.
The opening track, “15 Step,” opens up with a scattershot drum beat and Thom Yorke, in his exhausted vocal style, wondering “How come I end up where I started? How come I end up where I belong?”
Barely present is the overwhelming paranoia that has been eating away at Yorke since OK Computer.
The piece-de-resistance is “Nude,” the slow-burning space-out with Yorke’s frail falsetto teetering over a backing string section. An astounding ten years in the making, the song is easily the band’s strongest work since Kid A.
Rainbows takes the listener through a five-song suite of uninterrupted, delicate brilliance with “Faust Arp,” a short, finger-picked piece serving as a quiet interlude. Nothing is filler here.
Perhaps the only misstep is the eighth track, “House of Cards.” The song is a ambling, reverb-laden skeleton of the version seen during the band’s 2006 tour of the U.S. and Europe.
The album closes on an eerie note. “Videotape” is a wholly dreary affair – it sounds like Thom is moping on his way up to “the pearly gates” with machine gun fire in the background. Further fueling suspicions that this may be the band’s last studio effort, Thom mumbles “”This is my way of saying goodbye/ Because I can’t do it face to face.”