Hail to the Thief: Special Collectors Edition

By 2003, Radiohead were trapped in a musical era they helped invent. By that time, they had essentially completed the ideal life cycle of a rock band, rising from an intermittently promising debut to become one of the world's biggest bands, creators of twin masterpieces that captured the fear, exhaustion, alienation, and anxiety of modern life in near-perfect musical settings. There is no rock record that did more to set the tone and establish the parameters for rock music in this still-young century than Kid A, an intentional masterpiece so brimming with creativity it spawned a sequel in Amnesiac.

How does a band follow that up? Well, for one thing, it doesn't try to make another masterpiece. The record Radiohead did make, Hail to the Thief, is almost an anti-masterpiece, a well-sequenced collection of songs that finds them internalizing the blend of experimental electronics and straightforward rock they wore so far out on their sleeves just a few years earlier. They basically started over, and on the record, the band sounds aware that it's peaked in a way, and perhaps less sure of where it wants to go. I hear the tension between a band that started to make the back-to-basics album guitarist Ed O'Brien so frequently mentions in interviews and a band that self-consciously want to do something new each time out and perhaps even feels guilt when it fails to innovate. They'd pushed their horizons so far already that they didn't have much exploring left to do.

Confusion and apprehension are written all over the album. Just look at the tracklist: "Scatterbrain". "A Wolf at the Door". "Sit Down. Stand Up". "2+2=5". "Backdrifts". They couldn't even decide what to call the songs, giving each one an obtuse parenthetical co-title. When Thom Yorke sings, "I don't know why I feel so tongue-tied," on "Myxomatosis", he sounds as though he's talking himself out of a creative eddy, and what better way to do it than over a crazed, fuzzed-out odd-metered groove? At 14 tracks and 56 minutes, Hail to the Thief is easily the longest Radiohead album, and it doesn't seem accidental that two-thirds of the way through lies a song called "There There", as if the band is consoling itself, recognizing that there are worse challenges than carrying forward in a successful rock band.

"There There" has one of the album's many ambiguous refrains in its "just cause you feel it doesn't mean it's there" turnaround, which could be taken as a brief rebuke to the anxieties expressed earlier. But what's even more striking about the song is how unremittingly gorgeous it is. It has a melody fitting for a jazz standard, but just as important is the rhythmic undercarriage. Drummer Phil Selway hardly plays a conventional rock beat anywhere on the album, here using kettle drums to give the song a distinctive buoyancy, while Colin Greenwood's bass part constitutes a second melody. Selway and Greenwood run away with "Where I End and You Begin", creating a rushing current to carry along the queasy synths and understated vocal.

It's one of the album's few vocals that could reasonably be called understated. Thom Yorke uses his full range across the record to give voice to anger, defeat, affection, frustration, and longing. He's a fantastic singer in general, but his real strength is in the way he can latch onto a simple phrase like "over my dead body" and twist and pull it to mean whatever he wants it to. His most virtuoso performance on the album comes on its breathtaking closer, "A Wolf at the Door", where he balances a frantically paced, paranoid verse with a towering chorus. It's on songs like this where you realize that this album, more than any of their LPs since The Bends, simply lets you concentrate on a what a good band Radiohead is without distracting you with thematic concerns, conscious innovation, or attempts to force a bend in the band's artistic arc.

Hail has a few low points and could probably be edited to make it that much more digestible-- apart from its tumbling bridge, "We Suck Young Blood" is a momentum-killer between the sinuous groove of "Where I End and You Begin" and the tangled loops of "The Gloaming" (it's also somewhat similar to the superior "Sail to the Moon"), while the brief "I Will" is pretty distracting from the album's overall flow. I would've been happier with it as a B-side. "A Punchup at a Wedding" has a disappointingly flat refrain, but makes up for it with the funky swagger of its rhythm track. Even the lowest points have their considerable merits, though, to the point where it even bears wondering whether Radiohead can even make a bad album at this point.

The tracks they did relegate to B-sides, now included on the second disc of Capitol's reissue, were certainly well-suited to their release format. "Paperbag Writer" is an interesting, even worthy experiment with programmed beats, a whacked-out bass line and creepy strings courtesy of Jonny Greenwood that at first sounds like an update on Martin Denny's version of "Quiet Village". Its counterparts sound for all the word like odds and ends. Even the title of "I Am Citizen Insane" sounds forced, "Where Bluebirds Fly" is an exercise in creating texture with almost no content, and three of the four remixes and alternate versions that backed "2+2=5" aren't especially interesting (Four Tet's take on "Scatterbrain" is the squirming exception). Yorke's piano sketch "Fog (Again)" is nice, and the quiet, acoustic "Gagging Order" is practically a throwback to the stuff they were putting on B-sides in the mid-90s, which is to say it's by far the best B-side included in the bonus material.

Even if it is a cash-grab by Capitol (and who can blame them the way things are going?), the bonus disc is a convenient aggregator for the band's fans. The video content on the third disc, meanwhile, offers little you can't experience easily on the Internet. The reissue also offers a chance to re-assess an album that's oddly failed to develop a solid reputation over the years since its release-- I've heard it described as everything from a disappointment to "their best album" to "too long" to "I don't remember what it sounds like" by fans of the band. For a while, I identified most with the last statement-- there's no denying that Hail to the Thief took longer to settle for me than any of their four preceding albums. Time and persistence have been kind to it, though. Hail to the Thief isn't Radiohead's best album, but it doesn't need to be, either. There are other albums for that. It did, however, prove that there can be life for a band after its landmark statement, and that life sounds pretty damn good.