Hail to the thief

Description

Times have changed. So have things. The world has become a howling beast, an animal that rushes from prey to prey, from wound to wound. Radiohead's sixth album is released and of course, it is much more than a collection of songs. In 2003, Radiohead is neither pop (those songs are not) nor rock, reductive and heretical. No, Radiohead is a band that takes itself very seriously, experiments with its producer (Nigel Godrich) and reflects like no one else the realities of the moment. Ultimately today, the quintet led by Thom Yorke has become adult, truly disturbing, essential.
Musically, the band takes all liberties and does better than recreate psychedelic or progressive styles. Radiohead now invents landscapes with muted colors, disordered sound perspectives, and atrophied contours. Drenched in swampy electronics, threadbare guitars, rhythmic screeches, stained with ancestral synths, interspersed with plaintive vocals born from an exploited despair but without rules, 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 different. No respite is granted. The tracks follow one another without resembling each other and appeal to all instincts, refined but also basic. By scrutinizing itself, Radiohead has found an identity without a map, at the turn of an even more vain cause than others that Yorke has the audacity to sing to the greatest number: a miracle. On the verge of becoming one of the five best in the world, Radiohead is also the most complex, the least docile band. A sign that deep down, perhaps not everything is lost.