stop making sense

I am very content with the new Radiohead album. For reasons that may be entirely contrary to several other fanatics. Everyone ought to support this album. I don't quite feel like labouring through a organized analysis, so here are some thoughts off the top of my head.

Hail to the Thief was a new place. But it wasn't comfortable. The juxtaposition of Radiohead's alterego, pining rock band on one hand, and sophisticated, droned, dark, morose, electronica outfit on the other, was forcibly pushed together. An alloy that didn't sound as if it fit. In Rainbows is also a new place. It's a "rainbowy" place. The alterego fusion works here. It isn't uncomfortable, or forced. It's smooth. House of Cards reminds me of The Clash. It's an isolated island in Thailand. The sun is shining. There are clouds and storms, but the harmony between them is most important. This is Radiohead stepping outside of that canon which is "Radiohead", by writing something of a more conventional pop song. But not conventional in the Bends kind of way; there are things here (where? here. hear.) that the Bends could only dream of. Jigsaw could pass for a Broken Social Scene song. Various songs hint at moments in OK COMP and KID A, but then quickly morph into something new and exciting. Faust Arp sounds like something off of Sgt. Pepper's. In Rainbows is perhaps the closest thing they've ever made to a comfortable album. Comfortable in its simplicity, serenity, design. There isn't the paranoid edge of earlier work (this is in part a lie; of course it's kind of bleak, I mean it is Thom Yorke); but instead a kind of comfort, serenity, at-peace or-coming-to-terms-with-itself. This is unpleasant for many die hard fans. I don't know why. Does the lack of past dread suggest a larger lack, a weakness in the album, or in fact a PRESENCE of a new found maturity for Radiohead? Songs are discoveries outside of the dark clouds of the past. They are, quite simply, "in rainbows". As an album, I think "In Rainbows" is in many ways the most intelligible thing Radiohead could have done to remain relevant today.

It turns out I have deceived myself and my reader and written something of an analysis despite my objecting to. What to do.