In Rainbows

I bought the latest Radiohead album the previous week. Oh, the reviews which no doubt you've read by now will all tell you it is good. I'll take that opinion as granted.



In Rainbows is OK Computer, but matured. It is an album that is confident, is comfortable. It sounds like Radiohead, but not any other Radiohead. OK was young, ambitious, and brimming with that genius which make it so memorable, while Rainbows is the product of everything since then: the electric veins of Kid A, the skeleton-melodies and ambience of Amnesiac, and the reluctant return to the mainstream that Hail to the Thief was.

The more I listen to Rainbows, the more I think it is the only proper album since OK Computer. It is complete, and the tracks all share a warmth without sounding like clones of each other. Like OK, there are the instantly appealing tracks (Reckoner, Nude, Jigsaw Falling Into Place), and the ones which grow slowly in your opinion. Kid A never had this completeness, neither did Amnesiac or Hail to the Thief. True to the artwork, there is something in utero about this progression, a kind of reverse-birth.

There are fantastic tracks in themselves, regardless of the context. Reckoner and Nude are beautiful songs, 15 Step is the grandson of Kid A, House of Cards brings some touching emotional articulation to Radiohead, and then it ends with Videotape bringing a slow, modulating, creeping end.

There is no explicit experimentation on In Rainbows, but there doesn't need to be. There are none of the unexpected electronic assaults or the staccato melodies of previous Radiohead efforts, In Rainbows doesn't need these things to be as good as it is.

S/Cooke