Big Ideas

"Housewife's Favourite"


By this point I've probably read twenty reviews of Radiohead's In Rainbows, but if only to prove that I still exist, here's my little review.

Now that I've had a month to listen and re-listen (and re-listen) to the album, it seems to me that Radiohead's "LP7" is the band's most significant accomplishment since Kid A. Thinking back to some of the news stories that popped up on fan sites like Green Plastic Radiohead and AtEase in 2006, I’m pretty grateful that the band ultimately decided to stick with Nigel Godrich as their producer. After all, why dismantle a winning combination? Godrich has helmed some of the best-sounding records of the last decade, including OK Computer, Kid A, Travis’ masterpiece The Man Who, Pavement’s swan song Terror Twilight, and Beck’s gorgeous acoustic album, Sea Change.

I won’t do a track-by-track because it’s been done far too many times in the past four weeks, but I will say that my favorite track is “Jigsaw Falling into Place.” It’s definitely the album’s most accessible track, besides maybe “Bodysnatchers,” and it’s a superb performance bursting with an ineffable and irresistible energy. Like “Bodysnatchers,” “Jigsaw” marks a notable shift in style for the band. Compared with the cold calculation and meticulousness of the songs on 2003’s Hail to the Thief, the tunes on In Rainbows have much looser arrangements that seem to suggest a return to a more performance-driven dynamic. It remains to be seen what kind of form the band will be in during their next tour (which is rumored to begin in May of next year), but if the recent “Thumbs_Down” webcast this past weekend is any indication, I think we can expect a rejuvenated Radiohead who seem to have recaptured a sense of fun and onstage immediacy in the last year or two.

Here’s a cool live version of “Jigsaw Falling into Place” from last year when it still had the working title of “Open Pick.”

GO! Open Pick (Live in Montreal)