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Track Listings
| 1. 2 + 2 = 5 |
| 2. Sit down. Stand up. |
| 3. Sail to the Moon. |
| 4. Backdrifts. |
| 5. Go to Sleep. |
| 6. Where I End and You Begin. |
| 7. We suck Young Blood. |
| 8. The Gloaming. |
| 9. There there. |
| 10. I will. |
| 11. A Punchup at a Wedding. |
| 12. Myxomatosis. |
| 13. Scatterbrain. |
| 14. A Wolf at the Door. |
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Product Description
Radiohead Photos
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More from Radiohead
 OK Computer |  The Bends |  Kid A |
 Pablo Honey |  Amnesiac |  The Astoria London Live |
Customer Reviews
Here it is, Radiohead fans - the final cumulative effort from the most original rock band in decades. Thief sounds nothing like The Bends, OK Computer, Kid A, or Amnesiac. Thief sounds everything like The Bends, OK Computer, Kid A, or Amnesiac. It is warm. It is cold. It is accessible. It is inscrutable. It is gorgeous. It is terrifying. It is immediate. It is distant. And, above all else, it is fascinating. For the people (okay, everybody) hoping Radiohead might warm up after their Kid A/Amnesiac double dose of nihilism, Thief does just that. But it does even more. Thief isn't another OK Computer. If you want that, you may want to listen to... OK Computer (that is why it exists in the first place). Instead, Thief is a cohesive mishmash of The Bends' immediacy, OK's layered guitar wails, and Kid A/Amnesiac's electronic gurgling. The critical thing is that Radiohead, as a band, have improved in all those musical approaches, and the result is their most sonically diverse album yet. Looking for proof? Just consult "2+2=5", a slow brooding echo chamber that, midway through, blasts into an electric-guitar fury that sounds like, of all things, a Pearl Jam song. Or try "Sit Down. Stand Up.", a forbidding piano haunter that slowly and sickeningly crescendos into an electronic hailstorm.
Those two songs encapsulate all the power and dread Radiohead can generate, and that's only the first eight minutes of the album. It speaks volumes of Radiohead that Thief is considered a "sunny" album, given that its mood falls just somewhere short of Suicidal. But after the stark minimalism of Kid A/Amnesiac (two records so bleak you practically expected them to create a black hole in the universe), the trace of humanity Radiohead injects into Thief makes all the difference. There's - gasp! - an acoustic song ("Go to Sleep"). And Thief's best song, "A Punch-Up at a Wedding", even dabbles in piano-tinged soul.
What keeps all of Thief's pieces together is Yorke's one-of-a-kind voice. Yorke has always sounded like a ghost from the netherworld, returning to warn you about the evils of mankind. But Kid A and Amnesiac distorted his voice even further, depriving it of its immediacy without adding to its eerie qualities (except on Kid A's title track, the only Radiohead song I personally can't stand). Here, Yorke's voice is more or less left alone, and it accents the texture of both the guitars and the electronic blips and quirks, particularly on companion pieces "The Gloaming" & "Backdrifts".
The band is also allowed to flex their muscles. Freakouts likes "2+2=5" are accompanied by slow crunchers like "There There," the lead single, and elegantly personal songs like "Where I End and You Begin" and "Scatterbrain". There's no lack of experimentation - "Myxomatosis" sounds like an orchestra of giant zippers, and "Wolf at the Door" is Radiohead's first Dylan homage - but all of it is exciting and never off-putting.
One could argue that Thief doesn't contain a signature moment of brilliance, such as "Paranoid Android" or "Pyramid Song". But it's the kind of album that reveals itself to you in new ways every time you listen to it. Overall, it accomplishes the impossible - resurrecting the best of the old while refining the new. And regardless of where they go from here, the one guarantee is that Radiohead will continue to go in directions that inspire surprise and amazement.
First, a major complaint is the album's cohesiveness. Or more like its lack thereof. It is true that the album stalls and restarts in spots. For instance, while "2+2=5" is like a punch to the face from one fist and "Sit Down. Stand Up" a follow up from the other hand, leaving you dazed and half-conscious during the beautiful, astral scenery of "Sail to the Moon", "Backdrifts" sort of stutters. "Backdrifts" itself is a pretty good song, and fits just fine after "Sail to the Moon." However, it doesn't seem to provide an adequete enough bridge between the first portion of the record and "Go to Sleep." In fact, the problem here may not be "Backdrifts," but "Go to Sleep." It just doesn't fit on the album that well. I love the song but it divides the record up.
"Where I End and You Begin" and "We Suck Young Blood" pick up the album again after "Go to Sleep" drops it, indulging in creepy lyricism and emotionally-over-the-top music. "The Gloaming" is conceptually a high point of the album but musically a weak point. Still, it serves the album just fine where it is, and even manages to segway into "There There" effectively. There's a sort of "gloaming" in the album, everything before this track being the dusk and everything after it the night. This fits with the oftentimes political preoccupation of the album fairly nicely.
"I Will" is a beautiful song, but the start of a scattered, unorganized part of the album. My biggest problems with the consistancy of this album mostly take place in this part. "Punchup at a Wedding" is a groovey, but under-written, song that fits poorly among the other songs. Perhaps if they had given it more time to age, it would have turned out a little better. Not a bad song by any means, but a low point in the album. "Myxomatosis" is a fantastic, adrenaline-driven thrill ride on the wave of surging distorted bass synth and Phil's mind-boggling swung drum beat. As good as this song is, it still doesn't feel as though it contributes to the flow of the album as much as it should.
"Scatterbrain" brings the album back on track, with a crooning melody and guitars that hint back to the beginning of the record. It then flows seemlessly into "Wolf at the Door" which is one of my personal favorites on the album and a brilliant, unique album closer.
The other common complaint is the "straightforward," more live-production style. Radiohead fans have grown accustomed to studio-trickery and songs that are almost identical to their live versions (both in instrumentation and just general sound) was an alien idea to many. While I miss the spaced out, rich production of OK Computer, I have come to appreciate Hail to the Thief as a different album and a different bag of tricks altogether.
While initially I was disappointed in some ways, I have grown to love this album. It contains many of my favorite individual Radiohead songs (2+2=5, Sail to the Moon, Where I End and You Begin, We Suck Young Blood, There There, Wolf at the Door.) It may not work as a full album quite as well as Kid A or OK Computer, but once you stop expecting Radiohead to keep topping themselves, you may realize that Hail to the Thief is a fantastic album. It's a "low point" in Radiohead's discography because it's not genre-redefining, but in the greater scheme of popular music, it is flat out amazing. Its diversity, while breaking up the flow of the album, is also part of what makes the album so charming.
Overall, as a Radiohead album it gets four stars. But held up against the rest of the music world, it gets a five, easily.
A big part of why HAIL TO THE THIEF is such a success is that the band combines the strength, aggression, and subliminal protests of their early albums with the oddity and surreal techno sound of KID A and AMNESIAC. The result is Radiohead's finest album since OK COMPUTER, and also their darkest and most unsettling. On HAIL TO THE THIEF, the band is no longer trying to take a stand. To them it seems that time is up, and they're just going to rub it in our faces, with lyrics like "We can wipe you out anytime," "You have not been paying attention," and "We tried but there was nothing we could do." Listening to this album, I can't help thinking that Radiohead is the best band since The Beatles, and that HAIL TO THE THIEF is the Radiohead equivalent to THE WHITE ALBUM, a diverse collection of songs (though these are, of course, considerably more morose than anything The Beatles ever composed). Though there's not a bad or even lackluster song in the bunch, there are a number of songs that stand out above the rest, such as the firey opener, "2+2=5" (a reference to George Orwell's masterpiece of dehumanization and paranoia, 1984), the rolling "A Punchup at a Wedding", the brilliant "Myxomatosis" (the very sound of rage), the dreamy, drifting "Sail to the Moon", the surprisingly down-to-earth "Go to Sleep" (the most "normal" Radiohead song since OK COMPUTER), and the hopeful yet bizarrely morose "A Wolf at the Door".
The band is at its finest, both performance- and composition-wise. These are some of Thom Yorke's most intricate and meaningful lyrics, to which Thom lends some of his finest vocals. Strongly supporting him are razor-edged guitar from Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien, prominent bass by Colin Greenwood, and impressively varied drumming styles from Phil Selway. The album's themes deal primarily with the feeling of paranoia, distrust, suspicion, and disillusionment from the 9/11 attacks as well as the Iraq War and the U.S. government's handling of the situation (guess who the titular "Thief" is?). It was clear that Radiohead was back in a big way - they experimented on KID A and especially on AMNESIAC, and HAIL TO THE THIEF was where they combined that with their pre-Y2K sound to make one hell of an interesting recording.
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