It started with OK Computer; never thought it would end like this. It's been a gradual process, but Radiohead has moved from front and centre of my musical landscape to a place nearer the periphery (though the topographical metaphors are tricky, because the band played such a large part in shaping said landscape in the first place)...anyway, the upshot is that while I got In Rainbows right near the beginning of the year, or whenever the deluxe box set arrived in the post, I haven't felt moved to listen to it over and over (at least, not until the last couple of days a little bit).
In Rainbows leads off with a Kid A-esque skid-and-clatter and reedy Yorke chant which doesn't take long to develop into a wiry sort of latter-day Radiohead pastoral almost-rocker ("15 Steps"), followed by a more out and out chugging rock song of the kind that they've been putting on the last few lps ("Bodysnatchers" - like "15 Steps", it's good), but it's a misleading opening pair, because as a whole In Rainbows is actually the band's prettiest album (knocking off The Bends, I reckon, though it's a near thing). They've retained the production style and general aesthetic of their more recent work, but the songs themselves feel much more organic - guitars, pianos and vocals are at the forefront, and while one still feels that the band is stretching itself, the music here feels more like a shading in of territory already skipped over or hinted at in previous releases, rather than a break or leap in a new direction in the vein of Kid A (which seems destined to remain the high water mark in that respect, both in terms of the change that it marked from what had gone before it to that date, and on its own intrinsic musical terms - more and more, it seems the critical document in their discography taken as a whole).
A very high proportion of the rest of the record is made up of plaintive, circling, sometimes-verging-on-miraculous Radiohead Ballads ("Nude", "All I Need", "Videotape" - and "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi" and the version of "Reckoner" on here almost qualify as well), and then there's a pair of quiet, folky meditations, one of which ("Faust Arp") reminds me in equal parts of Pink Floyd at their sparest and Nick Drake, while the other kind of takes its cues more from Robert Wyatt ("House of Cards"), plus only one other fairly rocky track near the end in "Jigsaw Falling Into Place"...and it's all very good - there isn't a weak song amongst them, and the replay value is pretty high. But somehow, I haven't internalised it in the way that I did all of their others up to (but not including) HTTT...
The cuts on the second disc are generally less fully-realised, but the songs are still strong, and largely in line with the style of the album proper.
