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Now that's it's been a little
while since the release of Radiohead's latest album, Hail
to the Thief, I can safely offer my review. To properly render
a considered critique, I locked myself in my apartment with
the new record for one week, doing little else but give it
one spin per day.
Day One: The first listen, sitting cross-legged on my sofa,
eyes closed, just experiencing the music through a superior
set of headphones. Initial reaction: this album is important,
a watershed aural event, nothing short of a revolution in
popular music. It picks up on the promise of OK Computer,
delivers the goods that Kid A hinted at, and nearly makes
me forget the sterling songcraft of The Bends. Amnesiac is
now consigned to a fate as little more than a shiny coaster
for my can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, banished to the corner of
memory reserved for long-passed great aunts and advanced algebra.
I remove the headphones, knowing that I will return tomorrow
to further experience the rapture a first listen merely hints
at. I know that I will hardly sleep, but resist the temptation
to fall asleep to Hail's beautiful lullaby. I need to come
to Hail fresh in the morning, after a cup of Earl Grey.
Day Two: I am fully under Hail's spell. The second listen
is full of the giddy delights of a first sexual experience,
but with all of the fumbling, apologies, and awkward financial
negotiations cut blissfully away. The album's myriad textures
are slowly revealed. The loneliness in singer Thom Yorke's
voice is a dirge like that of five thousand female Asian babies
left exposed on the side of a mountain, knowing the beautiful
alienation that only one utterly rejected by an ancient culture
that is struggling in the depersonalization of the technological
age can know.
I sob openly. The pizza delivery guy asks if there's anything
he can do to help. He sits and listens to "There There,"
the album's ninth track with me, and embarrassed that he is
also bawling, leaves me extra packets of ricotta cheese and
a voucher for an order of free cinnamon sticks.
But I can't think of eating.
I go to bed hungry but not realizing it. I can only hear the
haunting, electronic-but-somehow-tribal thump of "Backdrifts'
" drums as I long for slumber. I forget that somewhere
in my primitive brain I am vaguely annoyed that all of the
tracks have parenthetical subtitles.
Day Four: Still haven't eaten. How could I when I have my
fourth play of Hail awaiting me? I pop in the CD and the music
rejuvenates me. This time it's voluptuous, brimming with a
sexuality I hadn't grokked on the third listen. I can't quite
make out what Yorke is singing in "2+2=5," but I
am profoundly aroused. Hail ceases entirely to be music; it's
the procreational struggle, the delicious tension that keeps
singles bars overflowing with the nubile. I climax over and
over, as if in the thrall of nymphomaniac Venezuelan beauty
queens stranded on a tropical oasis with nothing but their
carnal appetites. By the end of the tenth track, I fear that
my relentless self-love is going to require surgical intervention.
But I am saved on the eleventh song, "A Punch Up at a
Wedding," as I am certain John Lennon and a Pet Sounds-era
Brain Wilson are briefly resurrected to hum along with a particularly
winsome synth line. Then they are gone as quickly as they
appeared, vanishing into the lilting ether of Yorke's fragile
falsetto.
What a listen this fourth time around turns out to be. The
word "important," which I'd so cavalierly thrown
around on Day One, has lost all meaning. Perhaps as I try
to sleep I'll conjure a better one.
Day Five: Jury duty. I'd totally forgotten. I go to the courthouse
and sit around all day waiting my turn to be empanelled, then
patiently explain I need to get home to listen to Hail, perhaps
the greatest recording in the history of art-rock, or any
other genre of music, as the ghettoization inherent in the
"art-rock" label can surely not contain Hail's multitudes.
An angry bailiff rolls his eyes and confiscates my CD player
and a burned copy of the album.
I have to think on my feet to get back to Hail, so I earnestly
tell the defense attorney that if his client is not a pure
albino, I will have to deem him guilty, as only albinos are
pure -- you can see their purity on the outside.
I am dismissed. The client, as it turns out, is a Latino gentleman
accused of nonpayment of child support.
The fifth listen is like the fourth, only more so. My notes
are incomprehensible; I can decipher only bite marks on my
legal pad and, strangely, on a bottle of Lubriderm.
No food, fitful sleep.
Day Six: Something is wrong.
Backlash. I realize it instantly, but am powerless against
it.
From two minutes into the first track, I am distressingly
disinterested. I find myself fixated on the improperly solved
titular equation of "2+2=5," and the parenthetical
subtitles are driving me fucking batty. I am hyperaware of
every dissonance interrupting the spaces where the hooks should
be, where the songs should transition from meditations to
juggernauts of harmony. Where the hell are the songs? What
exactly are these Radiohead characters trying to prove without
a single lyric I can sing in the shower, a melody I can whistle
while mopping the kitchen floor, a drum line I can tap out
on my coffee table?
I put in a copy of The Bends and cue up "Fake Plastic
Trees," letting Radiohead Past and Present duke it out.
I break dishes and tug at my hair.
I divide my apartment in half with a roll of duct tape, firmly
aligning myself with the new Bends fiefdom. It takes me three
songs to realize that Hail has the side with the front door,
the television, and the bathroom.
I don't know what I ever saw in Hail. It's overblown, pointlessly
confrontational, no fun. It's a treatise, a journal presentation
where a keg party should be.
I huddle up with The Bends and fall asleep with my ear pressed
to its speaker.
Day Seven: I wake up to quiet. The duct tape border seems
a little silly, as does the miniature Checkpoint Charlie I'd
apparently set up in my sleep constructed from sofa cushions
and shoe boxes. There's a cup of urine on the nightstand that
I properly dispose of in the toilet, blowing past the manmade
divisions that must have seemed reasonable yesterday.
I have a couple of slices of the pizza that's now unappetizingly
stale, but I'm fucking starving.
I press play for the seventh spin of Hail.
You know, it's not bad. A little rock, a little electronica.
Lame lyrics.
Six out of ten stars.
You know, no big whoop.
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