What a pleasure it is to listen back to an album you’ve not heard for a while, and find it’s as good as you remember, if not better. In the history of Radiohead, ‘Hail To The Thief’ is liable to be a bit overlooked, sandwiched as it is between the ‘Kid A’-‘Amnesiac’ double act and the pay-what-you-like ‘In Rainbows’. It shouldn’t be overlooked – it’s worth more than that.
The album, I think, was the point at which Radiohead managed to comfortably straddle the line between their rock band origin and the experimental electronic identity they’d been cultivating. You wouldn’t know it from the singles – ‘There There’, ‘Go To Sleep’ and ‘2+2=5’ are all pretty traditional to be honest, but there’s a lot going on across the rest of the album. Despite this, it hangs together as a cohesive work very well, and it maintains a pretty consistent quality. After the riotous opening of ‘2+2=5’, ‘Sit Down Stand Up’ builds from a cautious beginning into a brief but effective piece of dance music. ‘Sail To The Moon’ is a textbook Thom Yorke piano led ballad, and so the album continues, touching all the bases nicely. There’s a great sense of attention to detail within the album as well – favourite moments include the break before the second chorus of ‘Backdrifts’, the additional 2 beat bar halfway through verse one of ‘Where I End And You Begin’, the exceptionally dischordant harmonies that begin ‘A Punchup At A Wedding’ and the vocal delivery of ‘Wolf at the Door’.
There are a couple of weaker spots. ‘The Gloaming’, despite being a pivotal part of the album, doesn’t do a lot for me, and ‘Scatterbrain’ is easily skippable, but neither song is bad, and they’re certainly made up for by their surroundings. Wonderful, all in all.
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