| Warp + Weft: Radiohead :: In Rainbows |
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| Written by Steve McPherson | |
| Tuesday, October 16, 2007 at 10:20 AM | |
 RadioheadIn Rainbows inrainbows.com radiohead.com/deadairspace It'd be easy to say that In Rainbows is Radiohead's first filler-free album in, well, forever. At the very least, it's the first since The Bends to not have at least one fragment-type track, by which I mean no "Fitter Happier." No "Treefingers"; no "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors"; no "I Will." And tracks like those aren't the only thing you could consider a kind of filler; there are no subtitles to the songs (as on Hail to the Thief), and while Pablo Honey is, like The Bends, all fully-realized songs, most of those songs are mere shadows of what Radiohead would become. And then there's the way the band is offering the album for download at whatever price you name. This isn't a simple publicity stunt—this is a band living up to the ideas they first began exploring with Kid A, when their promotions for the album were inspired by Naomi Klein's No Logo. And so in a way, even their presentation of the record is filler-free. Maybe a more accurate thing to say, however, is that In Rainbows is Radiohead's most naturalistic, least deliberate album yet, because to call all those other elements of their catalog filler is to misunderstand how they fit into their music. Tracks like those four mentioned above certainly have an inessential quality—unless you're making some kind of mix tape for a weird party, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who'd listen to any of those songs aside from the albums on which they reside. Certainly when they're compared to the standout tracks from Radiohead's catalog, they don't hold up as songs, but then again, they're not supposed to. You might skip them when they come up, but would OK Computer be the same without "Fitter Happier?" In a sense, it's the most important track on the whole album, breaking the record in half and addressing most directly the central theme of the record—the alienating effects of progress, technology, and popular culture on humanity. The lyrics are simply slogans, sung not by Thom Yorke, but read by a computer speech program over a tinkling piano track. And so even if you only listen to it a handful of times, it's the hinge of the entire record. I doubt that Radiohead intends for you to evaluate it with the same ruler as a track like "Paranoid Android" or "Airbag." In fact, for a band like Radiohead, the idea of evaluating their music on a song-by-song basis seems a little foolish if you really want to get into what they have to offer. A poster on Mnspeak named kevin wrote the following about the new Radiohead record: "If this is anything like most every other album I've heard in the last five years, it will have two good songs and eight awful ones, thus making it worth exactly $0 to me." Leaving aside the ridiculous idea of being able to group all the records you've heard in the past five years and making some kind of generalized statement about them (even trying to think about all the records I've heard since 2002 is enough to make my head spin), I take issue with the idea that each song on a record like In Rainbows is something to be given a thumbs up or thumbs down and then either treasured or discarded. Wholesale approval or rejection of an album or a band based on their individual songs just doesn't parse for me. Which brings us back to the idea of filler, or what I'd prefer to refer to as incidental or non-song tracks. For a lot of listeners, they're viewed as vestigial, skipped or left out of iTunes playlists after a listen or two. But like vestigial organs, they often point directly to a band's developmental process. After releasing two records of end-to-end songs (Pablo Honey and The Bends), Radiohead included "Fitter Happier" on OK Computer as a way of working through Yorke's feeling that a straight approach to him delivering the lyrics didn't work. As it is, it's not a complete song, and Yorke and co. didn't want to build it into one, and this displays a very distinct interest in the process behind songwriting. If you're goal is just to write songs, you either finish them completely or discard them when they don't work. What Radiohead did with "Fitter Happier" is to get it to a point where they could recognize its message and weight, and then essentially throw their hands up, leaving it jagged because that's the way it worked best. It's really the first indication of the disillusionment with traditional song structures that led the band into the dark, electronic territory of Kid A, Amnesiac, and Hail to the Thief. On Kid A, Radiohead's bones are showing. The band is questioning every aspect of the songwriting process: they're manipulating Yorke's vocals; they're relying less on guitars and more on samples, noise, and other instrumental colors like horns. And yet for all this, the tracks are either more or less traditionally song-like ("The National Anthem," "Idioteque"), or they're experiments in texture ("Kid A," "Treefingers," "In Limbo"). And so even as they push themselves further out on those experiments, the very fact that they reside next to more straight-ahead tracks means they're keeping one foot on the shore. As long as there's that yin-yang divide—that duality to their albums—the albums say more than the songs can say on their own. After all, since this trend continues through their next two albums, you could reasonably compile a collection of songs spanning Radiohead's entire history and remain largely unaware of their more abstract and experimental work. It stays safely sequestered away for the most part.  Radiohead: See how relaxed they look? Fitting, then, that the first words of album opener "15 Step" are, "How come I end up where I started?" And yes, the song is built around a clicking and stuttery rhythm track, but it's also built around a beautiful, fingerpicked guitar part that's almost Shaker-like in its simplicity. The whole record, really, has an economy of motion to it. It never feels like it's striving for anything, even when it echoes pieces of their back catalog. Compare "Bodysnatchers" with two other songs that find their center of gravity in heavily distorted low-end riffs: "The National Anthem" from Kid A and "Myxomatosis" from Hail to the Thief. They're all three great songs, but where "The National Anthem" is built very consciously around cacophony and cut-and-paste drums and "Myxomatosis" is almost queasy in its claustrophobic arrangement and insistently off-center meter, "Bodysnatchers" finds a way to take that aggressively fuzzy backbone and make it ride loose under the drums. It's a gloriously open and freewheeling song, almost recalling the carefree abandon of Hendrix's "Drivin' South" from The BBC Sessions. Many of the songs on In Rainbows are old songs with new names, new lyrics, and/or new arrangements, including "Nude," which, along with "All I Need" and "House of Cards," are as fine a set of love songs as Radiohead has ever made. "House of Cards" even begins with the supremely un-Radiohead line, "I don't want to be your friend / I just want to be your lover." At its heart, In Rainbows is a romantic record on many levels: for its simple emotional pleas, for its inherent trust in the power of song, for its spirit of reconciliation with the entire spectrum of tools that Radiohead have worked with. Nowhere is that last aspect more evident than in "Nude." One particularly difficult to watch moment in Grant Gee's generally uncomfortable Radiohead documentary, "Meeting People Is Easy," is a scene at a concert where Yorke stops singing the lyrics to their worldwide mega-hit "Creep" and simply lets the audience do all the work. The look on his face says, What's the point? Radiohead—at least since they scored a mega-hit—have never shown the least interest in scoring another, and in many ways essentially disowned "Creep." It does, after all, fit poorly into their body of work, an anomaly of quiet verse/loud chorus grunge-esque rock that sounds positively clumsy compared to the deft dynamic touch they've mastered. But comparing "Nude" to "Creep," you'll see that the verses share much in common: the feel of the bass line, the delicately picked guitar, the diminished chords that set up tension and resolution. In "Creep," all of that is in the service of simply setting up the explosive chorus—the verses are nothing special in that song. But in "Nude" they're lush and subtle, and instead of being barely restrained, they're relaxed and comfortable. The entire song doesn't build up so much as grow into a tower of harmony that recalls "Sail to the Moon" from Hail to the Thief. It's like a miniature of In Rainbows as whole: the sound of a band not following threads so much as taking the threads they've been following and knitting something cozy out of them. Those "filler" tracks: they're not gone. The work they did is still curled up inside the songs on In Rainbows. Their purpose was to tie albums together when the songs alone couldn't do it—to advance Radiohead's idea of Radiohead, to give them a way to do more than just write songs, to be more than just a band. But on In Rainbows, they've stepped into a new phase in their career: they are just a band, and all they have to do is write songs. Download "Bodysnatchers" or stream below: Download "Nude" or stream below: |
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| Last Updated: Wednesday, October 17, 2007 at 09:17 AM |
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