Rainbow Bright

Radiohead have made a masterpiece. Radiohead have changed the face of music. Radiohead have betrayed their fans. Radiohead have made their best album since OK Computer. Radiohead have lost it. This album is amazing. This album sucks. This album puts me to sleep. This album is so good, it makes me want to cry.

All of that comes from reading hundreds of initial comments on Stereogum this morning. The first impressions are pretty sharply divided on Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows, released today as a digital download. But you know what? It makes me really happy that everyone has different opinions, and that they are all just as new as the music. Radiohead only announced that this album would be available ten days ago, so we haven’t had time to be innundated by 273 reviews, the band on the cover of every music and pop culture magazine out there, and scores of reviewers, columnists and bloggers telling us what a massive success/disappointment this album was going to be. In the absence of a push by the marketing machine, I got to come to the album fresh and form my own opinion, free of outside influences, and that was a pretty nice feeling.

So what is my opinion? Brilliant. I’m currently on my fifth listen, and what I’ve found is a gorgeously textured album, definitely worthy of being placed alongside OK Computer and The Bends as one of my favorite Radiohead albums. This disc finds the band in excellent form, creating a more organic and mature rock sound—the experimental electronic beats and squawking guitars of Kid A and Amnesiac have been toned down by acoustic guitars, piano and strings, and the result is a surprising marriage of styles that, in some places, veer dangerously close to pop songs. Some tracks even have a bit of an upbeat feel, which for Radiohead makes them the equivalent of bright and sunny. Is this a kinder, gentler Thom Yorke and Co.? If so, I like it. “15 Step”, “All I Need”, “Reckoner”, and “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” are all highlights for me, but my favorite song is “Faust Arp”, a beautiful string-laden ballad that is reminiscent of both the Beatles and singer-songwriters like Nick Drake or Elliott Smith.

As for the whole “changing the face of music” mess, check out this business plan. Radiohead is not signed to a label, so they released the album today as a digital download, only available through their own website. You could begin pre-ordering as of October 1, and get this: each buyer got to choose how much they wanted to pay for the download. There was a blank field in the shopping cart on the website, and you could type anything in... even a zero. (I paid about $12—actually 6 pounds, because they’re English—because I like Radiohead and I figure I would have paid that much in the store for a CD.) At the same time, the band also made available a special edition box set with a second disc of music for 40 pounds (about $81). If you pre-ordered the box set, the cost of accessing the download today was included. And finally, the band plans to do a traditional CD release sometime early next year. So basically, Radiohead may have figured out a way to work around the inevitable leaking of their album (or at least make a little money off it) by doing it themselves. Sure, plenty of people probably paid nothing to download it today. But there are also probably a lot of people like me who felt comfortable giving money to a band they know they enjoy in exchange for new music (huh, how about that?). And with no record label and no distribution structure to support, whatever people do pay goes straight into Radiohead’s pockets. It’s interesting to see a band that has taken a strong anti-consumerism stance in the past now work the system so deftly. By setting it up to get the music out to as many people as possible early on (and ensuring it’s a superior product), eventually, enough of those people will cough up money for the CD or special edition after hearing a digital version that the album will make money. Or at least, that’s the idea. We’ll see if it works, but if the rumblings that other bands (Nine Inch Nails and Oasis, for starters) are looking into trying the same thing are true, there must be something to it.