Vinyl Diaries XI: Radiohead - In Rainbows

Rainbows? Not exactly miserabilist material. But then neither, quite, have Radiohead ever comfortably fit the bill as moping marauders.

Posterchildren for the disaffected, perhaps, but those with at least a modicum of interest in the world beyond. While their albums have steered, at times, into near sociopathically paranoid territory, perversely revelling in android tendencies and industrial coldness, there’s always been a heart beating away in there – a tendency towards shedding the replicant’s tear.

Such has been their impact on the musical landscape since emerging from Oxfordshire in the early 1990s, a new Radiohead album can never simply arrive according to its own terms. The past rests heavily on each new outing’s shoulders, recent releases dealing with this by smashing any traces of a link with the past before they have a chance to find a foothold. It’s not a stretch to suggest that their 19997 opus OK Computer irrevocably changed the face of modern music, a multi-faceted monster that simultaneously tore the still beating heart out of the sickening rock beast and breathed new life into the decaying form.

The claustrophobic Kid A and its slow-burning late-born twin Amnesiac took a twist for the darker, while Hail to the Thief put the piano front and centre and ratcheted up the ice quotient, veering into a realm of electronic detachment and giving slightly too much rein to Thom Yorke’s maddened disconnect.

The long-awaited follow up was finally unveiled last week, a commercially courageous (yet ultimately savvy) decision to release it online without record label backing, with fans allowed to decide just how much they wished to pay. But gimmick or musical distribution model of the future, the simple and wonderful fact is 10 new Radiohead tracks are available, and in the context in which the band has always worked best – album form.

Opener 15 Step misleads with the electro-clap impulses of a semi-detached drum-machine, not a million miles from recent Yorke territory in last year’s solo outing The Eraser. But after Yorke drops a few vocal lines, the humans arrive in force. There’s an organic, jazz-flavoured licking from Jonny Greenwood’s crystal clear guitar, Yorke warbles through the next section over the top of Colin Greenwood’s bass murmuring along near-funkily, then, instead of a chorus as such, Yorke shimmers in as Jeff Buckley piped through a church organ.

Phil Selway’s complex beatkeeping breaks, snaps, crackles back into being – and then they’re gone.

Bodysnatchers swaggers in on a fuzzy, looping riff – an old-fashioned rock stomper that cuts through the skin, peels to the core of your being, appeals to emotional fraughtness rather than the intellect. It’s the long-lost missing link between Pablo Honey and The Bends, unapologetically abrasive and squallingly . Yorke’s in typical self-deprecating mode - “I’ve no idea what I’m talking about” - but the music just doesn’t back it up.

It thumps and stonks along on this rollicking rock plane until, suddenly, smack on the halfway mark, it tears headlong over the precipice – a gorgeous, bruising, soaring bridge bringing a quick run of shivers to the spine.

Has the light gone out for you?
Because the light's gone out for me
It is the 21st century
It is the 21st century

It's glorious, an unshackled freefall with the euphoria one experiences in a dream of flying, over far too soon and dropping you back into a squalling shambles of a noise-pit, hungry for more.

Avoiding the comfortable format of verse-chorus-verse, these tracks are being built in ways that seem a natural fit for the idea being expressed. The strongest point in the track is echoed throughout the album – occurring in the bridges, in which the extrapolation of the elementary ideas has taken place, taken hold, and the shackles are off. They, and we, are free to roam in this new place, a new space of imaginative freedom where nobody will laugh at you for falling.

Long-time live fan favourite Nude is the perfect comedown, wandering up a damp and dreary corridor with a ghostly passage of backsucking drums and Bjorky ooh-ooh-oohs, dropping away to reveal a bassline of Mogadon funk and gentle tacka-tacka-tacked drums, before Yorke’s echoing, plaintive, signature angel-whimper:

Don’t get any
big ideas
They’re not
gonna happen

Stripped back to blues-jazz flavoured guitar, vocals, bass and drums, it’s unadorned, warm-blooded, breathing, the human condition adrift in a cavernous darkening. Cue the sample wash, then Yorke’s first real soar skyward of the album – deliciously confusing, as it is with the word ‘sinking’. More oohs follow, then it’s gone.

Counted in on drum sticks, crystalline single guitar notes and then overlayed with handfuls of broken chords, Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien's guitars tangling deliciously, Weird Fishes/Arpeggi is a bottom of the ocean swim through a tangle of lushly fecund reeds.

Again you actually picture a band, musicians playing to each other, for each other, chancing across the magical chemistry that has kept them yearning, stitched together for nigh on two decades. It’s the second track in a row that wouldn’t have found space on any of the last three albums, the mood too open, too natural, and one feels that Yorke’s solo album has freed up the band to explore new territory together, free of the electro-clinical albatross his dabbling was threatening to offer their exposed necks. It's not that the push towards these cold new boundaries wasn't welcome - it was an essential part of the Radiohead experience - but that it was threatening to become something of a new orthodoxy.

As the track progresses we’re sinking into the deepest ocean, drifting to the bottom of the sea. Yorke’s projecting out into the fish, but also drawing us with him. We’d be as crazy not to follow as he felt he would be, so we all weave amidst rocks phantom and real, perhaps searching for the near-mythical coy koi upon which Frank Black once chanced while on holiday from his mind.

This joyous underwater dive gets us three quarters of the way through, before we realise we really should have gone up for a breath much much earlier. It’s far too late now, and carried along by a sudden change in current, bright explosions in our mind as the oxygen entirely depletes in the form of the spangliest guitar undertow since Johnny Marr was but a Smith, we hit the bottom.

The track shimmers and glitters some more, light shattering as we look back through the ocean’s surface, absent-mindedly running our fingers against our scales and so comfortable in our new gills we don’t even wonder about them. Hidden at the very end, buried in the sand like a sunken gold sovereign, we hear Yorke’s chest voice, the rarely offered baritone we nearly never encounter these days, an alter-ego to the alter-ego reserved for a disarming dropping of the guard.

From the sea we travel into space, All I Need an open-sky odyssey that has Yorke waiting in the wings as angelic synths roll in, rippling around the growling, purring bass. It is a stripped back work of breathtaking beauty and heart-rending fragility – it’s Radiohead as the battered, heart-on-sleeve, baffled romantic, laying it all on the table for the world to see. Glistening glockenspiel gives it a bright innocence, until, once more, the safe ground crumbles beneath our feet and we’re thrust, along with handfuls of loose piano chord tumbles, into an Icelandic abyss reflecting a glacier blue hue borrowed from Sigur Ros.

Just as abruptly we’re tipped into Faust Arp, a strange, finger-picked acoustic guitar and string-swept folk-tinged affair. It’s modern folk yet without the psych or the freak, Nick Drake gone Mersyside.

Through headphones or well-spaced speakers the urgent coruscations of Reckoner offer disparate pieces playing in each ear - the left offering a 60s, Byrds inspired pop affair of tambourine and assorted other shakery, the right offering brilliantly broken beats and clangy cymbal stumbles. The two seemingly incompatible halves are allowed to drift in and out of their own parallel universes until the bass burbles in and the drums follow its looping bumble, the whole wonderful mess eventually sutured via plaintive falsetto, Yorke relishing his Dr Frankenstein stitching together of an album highlight.

The strings sweep back in for the bridge, the drums having dropped out to give them room, before all the goodies that have reared their head until now return. Divine melodies and optimistic progressions give it an air of hope, a move from minor keys into a more positive space than they may ever have inhabited.

This mood sticks around for House of Cards, yet there is ultimately something a little flat about the whole affair. It’s worthy enough in its own right, but too easily dealt with by that handful of dangerous tags – ‘pleasant’ perhaps being the most concerning. It drifts past without drawing the usual emotional response – there’s none of the sting in the tail we have come to crave. Perhaps it’s a grower, but I fear it’s a skipper.

A timely save comes with Jigsaw Falling Into Place, a rhythmically driven exhortation to ‘let it out’ and to dance - to dance the dance of the damned perhaps, but at least a dance to remember, a blunt instrument propelling us all gleefully along the road to ruin.

Album closer Videotape is the most pianofied track of the whole journey. Resting on a simple drum tack-boom, there is a pearly gate optimism difficult to recall anywhere in the Radiohead ouvre. Perfection is contemplated and – surprisingly - accepted .

No matter what happens now
I won't be afraid
Because I know today has been
The most perfect day
I’ve ever seen

Doubled piano chords high and low, tight drum rolls and stuttering tacka-tacks keep the space contemplative, the final lines echoing in our minds, a most un-Radiohead-like sentiment metronomically dropped and indelibly imprinted on the psyche as In Rainbows fades to black. The pot at the end of the rainbow reveals not gold as such, but life as it can be, a dream made real because, let’s face it, it’s there for the taking.

Surprising in its lack of grand gestures, histrionic propulsions and dramatic flourishes, there is a refreshing honesty throughout In Rainbows that is in reflection quite exhilarating. It is perhaps most groundbreaking in the sense there’s nothing groundbreaking about it at all. It doesn’t smash its way through, it doesn’t reinvent a wheel. It’s a band, five no-longer-lads from Abingdon, in love with music, perhaps even life, shamelessly, guiltlessly, displaying that love for the world to see.

The feeling is not that they are playing safe, but playing true. Muse can keep the overwrought drama queen territory they’ve carefully mined, Coldplay the syrupy hollowness over the emotional equivalent of a scraped knee. This newfound territory for Radiohead is both more moribund but – because of it – more true to life. It’s British but not the stiff upper lip; it’s the awareness of class, of difference, of struggle – personal and social – but with a newfound celebration of what can exist alongside and within all of that. If someone wants to be fitter, happier, and do so in a way at which they may once have reflexively sneered or despaired, they will, for now, be let be.

It’s not a return to any earlier stage, nor is it a complete exorcising of their last outing. Yet it’s undeniably, quintessentially Radiohead. The most striking thing is they seem comfortable in their own skin, finally happy to accept they are what they are and, as such, they have produced an unapologetic Radiohead album, soaked in the toys with which they love to play, the feints and glancing blows against normality in an unthinking sense, in favour of an aware position, an understanding of self in relation to a wider picture.

We don’t need to stop the fight for what we believe in, but we can occasionally let down our guard, smile at what we love, touch what we cherish, revel in the golden rays of sun peeking from beneath the approaching (or passing) storm.