Since the dented, warbling jazz trumpet faded from ‘Life In A Glass House’, signalling the end of Radiohead’s fifth studio album ‘Amnesiac’, rumour and quiet speculation began drifting like snow at every Thom Yorke contradiction and veiled word about the direction the band would take next.
From Pixie thrash, through post-rock to the sub-zero temperatures of avant-garde electronica, Radiohead have consistently twisted and turned through the media hoo-haw while managing to drag a stadium sized audience along with them, and as Hail To The Thief began to draw nearer, the mist of hype thickened. Phrases like ‘Full Of Sunshine’ and ‘Return Of The Guitars’ pointed at some kind of OK Computer affair - the gnawing masses of lazy hacks began salivating, pigeon holes at the ready...Yorke backtracks, he’s ran out of idea...
I guess it could be. The guitars are here – Jonny Greenwood’s splintered fender is stamped all over it – and the traditional rock band dynamic pulses and runs like a well maintained engine, but tape loops? Clicking drum machines? Hail To The Thief is soaked in menacing undercurrents of creeping noise.
And Sunshine? Dear God no.
The Fear is here, everywhere, buzzing and skulking. The Man (take one guess) strokes the big red panic button. Endless creditors with beady eyes and crimson hands, hounding and chasing, ringing in the dead of night, whispering ugly things. Youth being fed through the 21st century meat grinder, battered, sucked dry of all fluid, a planet full of broken men with Stepford wives. In contrast against the ambiguities of the last two Radiohead albums, Hail To Thief Seems to be seething with direction and grave warning, and failure to pay attention will have dire consequences: you and your kids on the chopping block.
And from the start Yorke is clawing at his throat. ‘2+2=5’ – ‘It’s the devil’s way now / there is no way out / you can scream & you can shout / Its too late now because / YOU HAVE NOT BEEN PAYING ATTENTION’ Over and over and over, Phil Selway’s drums detonating like Daisy Cutters, Guitars wailing and plummeting. ‘Where I End And You Begin’ is drowned in eerie synth and brooding, chugging bass. It’s about people getting left behind, falling through the cracks, forgotten but not gone. The sinister forces making the undesirables ‘disappear’. The dinosaurs are in charge and houses are falling into the sea. Things are breaking down. You could look at the lyrics for Hail To The Thief in a hat full of ways but they all spiral into fear of the imminent apocalypse of state and spirit, when the night sky lights up with nuclear daylight, but everybody’s too worn down to care.
‘We Suck Young Blood’ is the sound of the band on the verge of complete mental and physical collapse. Dragging hand claps and ghostly harmonies are hauled along by a tormented funeral march grand piano. Yorke’s voice wavers, cracking and sighing, ‘Our veins are thin / Our rivers poisoned’. ‘Backdrifts’ takes a Middle Eastern melody and shoots it through with loops, static and electronic drums. ‘Myxomatosis’ boils with a nerve shattering bass-line and icy stalactites of whining keyboards. The fear may be vast and deep, but the anger that things have reached such an ugly stage is just as biting.
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For me, the highlights are the final two songs – ‘Scatterbrain’ and ‘A Wolf At The Door.’ Probably because the former half lulls you to a gentle post-holocaust sleep before the latter kicks you in the teeth. ‘Scatterbrain’ is a beautiful song – just a sad, tumbling guitar and a gentle drum beat, while ‘A Wolf At The Door’ is a bilious cut-and-paste mosaic of paranoia, resignation and X-ray eyes. Yorke mumbles and slurs and growls, spitting acid – ‘I keep the wolf from the door but he calls me up / Calls me on the phone tells me all the ways that he’s gonna mess me up / Steal all my children if I don’t pay the ransom & I’ll never see them again if I squeal to the cops...’ and somehow its one of the most uplifting songs on the album. This is Radiohead’s genius – their ability to take a song and twist it until its something weird, something that’s both hideous and wondrous at the same time.
There is some dead weight over the 14 tracks. ‘The Gloaming’ sounds like a Kid A afterbirth, ‘Sail To The Moon’ plods along without really going anywhere, and ‘A Punch Up At A Wedding’, for all its strutting bass and house-chord pianos, is rather dull.
Hail To The Thief isn’t OK computer - it doesn’t have the monstrous scope and scale. It isn’t Kid A or Amnesiac either. The album sounds more stripped down, simpler but no less affecting because of it. Yet, I can’t quite shake the feeling that in the long run, Hail To The Thief is going to be overshadowed by its ancestors. A shame because what the band have to say now may matter more than anything they’ve done before.
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