Radiohead - Hail To the Thief
Parlophone
June 9th, 2003.
The sixth studio album from Radiohead keeps a morose eye on the future - a place where 2+2=5 is fact - and soaks up all the anxieties and unease surrounding the potential for societal collapse and deliberate decay. The modern man is a monster and your partners got it in for ya.
Coming off of the run of OK Computer, Kid A, and Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief feels likes a mish-mash of all three - a melting pot of sorts. It has the rock numbers as well as the more electronically skewed stuff. What it fails to do in creating a world to dive into, it makes up for as being a bit of a best of both - though not necessarily the best of the best. The previous albums mentioned all hone in on a singular soundscape/mood; this is where their strength lies, outside of being some of the finest albums ever put to tape, of course.
In atypical Radiohead fashion, HttT struggles to produce an overarching and immersive experience, but does other things in the process - it's somewhat lovable for this exact reason. You get the good with the bad - it integrates many memorable moments among many underwhelming ones. For example, 'There There' pops into view after the lackluster one-two of 'We Suck Young Blood' and infamous 'The Gloaming'. The Gloaming being a song that Radiohead live shows have become well endowed with over the years; to rather deflated and exhaled response.
HttT, in short, lacks cohesion, though you can find joy in this if you try hard enough - it is a pretty miserable album. All in all, it's not 'bad', per se, but put up to the light of previous projects and even future projects, and it does seem fairly bloated and humdrum.
You could look at this as a bit of a homage to just how incredible Radiohead are as a creative entity; a large number of bands, if not all, would put life and limb on the line to produce something up to this standard. However, up against Radiohead's other projects it just pales in comparison. A bit of a crazy perspective is needed to fully grasp why this record feels like its lacking.
