In Rainbows shows a cleaner, more focused Radiohead

The online-only album only costs as much as fans are willing to dish out.

By Kelsey Whipple

Published Oct. 12, 2007

Even before it hit eager inboxes the world over, Radiohead's seventh album, In Rainbows, was hailed as perfect — at least in marketing.

There's no skirting it: By releasing their latest on their Web site for as much as fans feel like dishing out, the guys made jaws drop and moguls think.

During a 2006 interview, vocalist Thom Yorke told an L.A. Times reporter, "I would love for us to drop a chemical weapon within the music industry."

Well, here it is.

But the ploy isn't the only aspect of the long-awaited "LP7" that might just save us.

In Rainbows is vintage Radiohead, a brilliant blend of dreamy melodies, thick electro-pulse, straining guitars and Yorke's patented bell-tolling neuroticism.

It's the sound of a cleaner, more focused Radiohead — one that cut out the middleman (along with some of the blips and bleeps), and along the way stopped trying to escape its leviathan reputation.

And although the musical libertines have come to terms with some of their baggage, there's still that aching modernism.

On "All I Need," Yorke croons "I'm the next step/Waiting in the wings/I'm an animal/Trapped in your car."

Paranoid, maybe.

Classic Radiohead, definitely. By remaining almost obstinately experimental, In Rainbows is as much a musical catalyst for Radiohead's peers as it is a business one for their managers.

The default setting of In Rainbows, like that of their entire catalogue, is "strange," but if it weren't, would it be Radiohead?

It's easy to picture Yorke, Greenwood and company lounging around, poking their laptops until that perfect sound comes out.

But they've ditched some of the extraneous noise in favor of emotion. The men and the machines fought, and the victory went to the fans.

On the love-rock serenade "House of Cards," that really is Yorke singing "I don't wanna be your friend/I just wanna be your lover." Of course, the next stanza kicks off with "The infrastructure will collapse," but it doesn't matter. The song is gorgeous.

Radiohead has always been the champion of giving fans what they didn't know they wanted, and In Rainbows is proof. The fact that live versions of the majority of the songs have been available for years is a testament to the obvious certainty of every track. The guys in Radiohead knew what they were doing, and the results are some of their most impressively collaborative in years.

The three-dimensional rhythm guitar of "Weird Fishes/ Arpeggi" makes lyrics about being "fishies ... eaten by worms" less disturbing, while "Nude," on which Yorke's vocal range would make Mariah Carey jealous, might well be the most beautiful song the band has ever released.

The lyrics will make you as uncomfortable as they ever did, (listeners, beware of the lights going out, the infrastructure collapsing and being eaten by worms), but the album, in its entirety, is a seamless one. Nothing is overdone except for emotion — there are no limits, and why should there be? Even people who don't "get" them should get the album, if only to be a part of the industry revolution.

The end result of the band's staunch focus on the album as a whole (as seen in their refusal to sell their music by the track on iTunes) is that listening to their latest creation is a vividly cohesive experience.

This is a band that has borne the cross of progressivism since The Bends, and if their feelings don't break them, they won't be relaxing their grip anytime soon.

And as for In Rainbows, it's their capstone. But I don't know. I might be wrong.