Time magazine has a 3 page article on Radiohead and Hail to the Thief:
Rock is used to front men like Bono (who wants to throw his arms around the world) and Mick Jagger (who wants to throw his legs around the world). But Radiohead’s lead singer, Thom Yorke, would just like the world to behave. His best songs ? Fake Plastic Trees, Let Down, Pyramid Song ? are written from the perspective of a perfectly rational person who thinks the rest of the world has gone nuts. As rock mantras go, this has all the sex appeal of “Get off my lawn!” But millions have been moved to heights of ecstasy by Radiohead’s calls for prudence, in part because Yorke usually provides a few reassuring words amidst his condemnation of technology, government and evil corporations, and in part because Radiohead can really bring the noise.
Still, for an elitist, fronting the best, most-identified-with rock band in the world presents an almost existential problem. In the past, Yorke and his bandmates tried to solve it by radically changing their sound on every album, until the albums got very dark and very weird. But the fans not only refused to be shaken off, they multiplied. So on Radiohead’s new album, Hail to the Thief, Yorke finally reached the inevitable conclusion that the only original and obstreperous thing left was to stop trying so hard to be original and obstreperous. “Before we started this album, I was thinking, ‘We’re gonna have to make some huge sonic leap again, keep changing, keep ahead of the rest,'” Yorke says between bites of a vegan meal at Radiohead’s west London rehearsal space. “And it did seem a bit silly to do it just for the sake of it, because that was never the point. It just took a while to get my head round not making any effort and just letting things happen.” Read the rest…