Hail To The Thief

Description

Times have changed. So have things. The world has become a howling beast, an animal rushing from prey to prey, from wound to wound. Radiohead’s sixth album arrives and, of course, it is much more than a collection of songs. In 2003, Radiohead is neither making pop (these songs are not that), nor rock, reductive and heretical. No, Radiohead is a band that takes itself very seriously, experiments with its producer (Nigel Godrich) and reflects the realities of the moment like no one else. In the end, today, the quintet led by Thom Yorke has become adult, truly unsettling, indispensable. Musically, the band takes every liberty and does better than recreating psychedelic or progressive styles. Radiohead now invents landscapes with muted colors, disordered sonic perspectives, atrophied contours. Drowned in swampy electronics, stringy guitars, rhythmic screeching, stained with ancestral synths, laced with plaintive vocals rising from exploited but unruly despair, the fourteen compositions of "Hail To The Thief" form an indivisible whole, a gaping black hole from which emerges a scabrous poetry with edges caramelized by the courage conferred by the visceral need to be something else. No respite is granted. The tracks follow one another without resembling each other and call on all instincts, refined but also basic. By constantly scrutinizing itself, Radiohead has found an identity without a map, around the bend of a cause even more futile than the others that Yorke has the nerve to sing to the masses: a miracle. On the verge of becoming one of the five best bands on the planet, Radiohead is also the most complex, the least docile band. A sign that, deep down, perhaps all is not lost.