I Might be Wrong::Dead Air Space

I'm going to add a little bulk to the site by having another look at my favourite album of last year. I think that critiquing an album when it's fresh and new is important, but thoughts and feelings tend to grow or change over time, and it tends to be a good sign when you continue to listen to and find new elements in an album that you enjoy.

My thoughts on In Rainbows follow...

Radiohead have often been a band full of wank. This is no bad thing, assuming you don't dig the minimal sound. They tend to surround a listener with a wall of instruments. I realise the previous statement might be full of wank itself, but I believe it to be true. They have a knack for immersing a listener in a thousand instruments at once. If you can come out the other side in one piece (often Radiohead can be awfully brooding to the point of deep, blue-y depression), you'll be all the better for it.

In Rainbows is the product of 2 years (!) of privately funded recording after the band split with giant record label EMI. The album, released only online at first, was unveiled to the world just days after Radiohead reported the post production was finished on their blog Dead Air Space. Accessed through their website, users were able to download full quality versions of the 10 songs that comprise In Rainbows. In a shock move that seemed a direct attack on record labels, the album was available for whatever price the user wanted to pay for it- be it 0 cents or 10,000 dollars (the sum reported to have been paid by one Nine Inch Nails frontman). For those that wanted the album art and lyric booklet, they had to wait 3 months for the CD to appear on shelves on the 1st of January, 2008.

After you cut out all the bullshit, the only thing that can make an album stand up or fall down is the music. On first play In Rainbows feels stripped back and withdrawn, as if there's less clutter and noise. The songs creak with the occasional synth or string, but really, for the first time in a long time, you feel as though Radiohead are a band with instruments and not just frontman Thom Yorke with a lazy eye and a drum machine.

Opening with two rockier numbers, you get a feel as though they've decided on a bigger direction, an angrier direction. They're still lustful and sweet, but they're not the down in the gutter kind of loving/fucking you'd get with old songs Street Spirit or How To Dissapear Completely. 15 Step and Bodysnatchers open the album with a kaplomb (is that even a word? A quick check on dictionary.com says that no- it is not) of guitars going every which way.

A return to a more 'regular' radiohead follows, with track Nude bringing the soft melody back. This continues through a lazy Sunday style middle-of-the-album, featuring songs Weird Fishes and Reckoner- and it's here where the listener can understand where the 2 years of recording dissapeared. The real return to the guitar comes from first single Jigsaw Falling Into Place. Check Youtube for a video of this clip filmed only from helmet cam. It's about as simple as it gets.

I guess that's really the vibe for this record- even when they strip everything back that they've given over the previous 6 albums, they still seem to maintain such a full sound. On In Rainbows, it's particularly warm and lush. Again with the wank- I know, I know. I'll put it away.

Best song on the album? It's hard to pick, but If MP3's could wear out, my copy of Bodysnatchers would cease to exist.

This review has taken me about as long to write as it does to the listen to the album. I probably could have just written 'It's really fucking great', but that wouldn't do it justice, now would it?

Hopefully the band will land in Australia this year after they tour Japan in October. They're leaving it a little late for announcements but fingers (and toes) are crossed..