Radiohead
Hail To The Thief

THE REVIEW

Was it really necessary to come out with yet another review of a Radiohead album? Yes, it was. Since, in fact, this afternoon I am bored, I thought I'd stir you up a bit by vaguely chatting, without any expertise, about one of the albums by the all-English alternative-everything band that I like the most. It's "Hail to the Thief," album number six, released in the year of our Lord 2003.

If you take a sharp look at the artwork framing this album, you can notice some interesting details: many colored rectangles, each containing an acronym or a word belonging to the modern world (24 HR, TV, Popcorn, Autos, Vacant, Screen, etc.). At the top, there are ominous black smudges rising that touch the sky's bright blue, emitted precisely by these “posters” with acidic colors. In short, you don't need the Enlightenment elite to understand the underlying message of the cover: alienation. The good Thom with his disarming falsetto (in a good way, eh) knows something about that. Alienation is the cancer that permeates every single work by Radiohead; a toxic cloud that you can inhale deeply after the two hundredth listen of Ok Computer, or the third of Kid A — one of the most unbearable and heart-wrenching things ever created by a human mind, capable of unsettling even the most enlightened of Buddhists.

Even in this album number six, therefore, you find intact the taste for nihilism and despair, and incomprehension, and the electronic dirges (Where I End and You Begin, track six; The Gloaming, number eight) blended with some old rock sounds, which vaguely — very vaguely — recall early Radiohead. So we are quite far from the heavy electronic wrecks of Amnesiac and the more recent, less appreciated The King of Limbs. Here, in these nihilistic shores, you can still feel the weight of the Radiohead-band rather than just Thom Yorke: the drumming is powerful, almost martial in There There, where good old Thom introduces us to the divine world of illusion (“Just 'cause you feel it / Doesn’t mean it’s there”) and randomness (“We’re accidents waiting / Waiting to happen”); minimal, sweet, liquid guitar sounds that support Thom's high pitches, before the liberating "Because!", in the opening track (2 + 2 = 5; and I could hardly agree more). In short, the acoustic component makes its presence felt.

The album's themes, as mentioned, are more or less the same. It’s pure despair, it’s the echo of the generation ics that cannot find a decent place in the world, and which is first seduced and then abandoned by all those words we find on the cover. There is also, according to some, a vague anti-American mockery (the title is said to parody "Hail to the Chief," the march played for the US President). If I were to relate this record to literature, I am reminded, for the affinity of the evoked images, of the novel La vita agra by Bianciardi, written yes in the '60s, but still very much alive and current in carrying forward the denunciation of metropolitan alienation and the disorientation caused by the loss of absolute values like love, friendship, and so on; all in favor of capital growth. The protagonist, Luciano, is very similar to the "mongrel cat" in Myxomatosis: a victim of the system, thrown around among Sunday arrivists, hedonists, people who do not understand or pretend not to understand, bloodsuckers who first absorb the best of you and then leave you to die in the street (“You should put me in a home / Or you should put me down”). Let’s proclaim it with frankness: the “mongrel cat” is the sickly alter ego of us all.

"Hail to the Thief," in short, is the story of this world, a pool full of shit where you have to paddle hard to stay afloat while trying to swallow as little as possible. It doesn't add anything new to what has already been said by Radiohead themselves — and I imagine, writing this sentence, what Napo from Uochi Toki’s reaction would be reading it — in their previous efforts (Ok Computer above all), but it remains nonetheless a great work, certainly deserving of at least ten listens. Thank you for reading my very first review. Now insult me all you want: I think I’ve earned it.