I finally got Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows, and pleased to report several songs can be classified as crunchy or thrashy (“Bodysnatchers,” with lead guitars even reminds me of Sonic Youth’s newest, Rather Ripped). Plus there’s not only Melody but Several Guitars. Real Drums! Something called an Ondes-Martenot, among other keyboards!
Radiohead being what they are, Rainbows also features cutup vocal effects with bleeps and boops that swaddle lead-singer Thom Yorke’s tremulous falsetto, reflecting the group’s style over its more-electronic brethren Kid A and Amnesiac—these songs are much more warm, catchy. After a few listens, I even found a few stuck in my head. (The songs from Kid A and Amnesiac got stuck in my head, too, but only because I had purchased them on cassette and listened to one or the other ever day for the better part of a year during my work commute in Cleveland.)
Part of the warmth, too, of Rainbows, may be that second-person has supplanted the first-person that featured almost exclusively into the lyrics of earlier Radiohead albums such as OK Computer; in other words, these songs appear to be more about relationships—doomed, maybe, but relationships nonetheless—which lends yearning and hope: “You’re all I need,” “You were not to blame for / bittersweet distractors,” I don’t want to be your friend / I just want to be your lover,” “You used to be all right / What happened?”