It’s difficult to see the purpose of this record. A live album? A ‘rounding up’ of the ‘Kid A’ / ‘Amnesiac’ era? An opportunity to show how tracks from these two albums worked in a live context? In some ways, it’s all of these things – in other ways, it’s none of them.
It’s too short to work as a convincing live album. In fairness, it was released and priced as a mini-album, so that’s perhaps an unfair criticism, but it seemed (and still seems) a waster opportunity – a few earlier tracks would have made welcome additions. Does it round off the era? I guess so, though you could say the same about ‘Hail To The Thief’, which arguably does the job a little better. So, an opportunity. Would Radiohead really have wanted to prove themselves like this? It flies in the face of the more self-consciously difficult approach they’d been working with. And, to be fair, it doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to listen to the studio versions of ‘Idioteque’ or ‘Morning Bell’, say, and not see how they would work on stage.
Three tracks, though, make this worthwhile. ‘Like Spinning Plates’ is the most radical departure from the album version, replacing the programmed backing track with a simple circular piano accompaniment to great effect. ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ starts in the same place as the ‘Kid A’ version, but mutates into a pulsing beast of a track. ‘True Love Waits’, the closing track, is the albums main draw – the only track not available elsewhere. It’s radically different to the rest of the album: a solo performance on Thom Yorke’s acoustic guitar, but it’s a thing of beauty.
The album as a whole – decent enough, but a footnote, really.
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