HAIL TO THE THIEF

Radiohead are one of my favourite bands but this album... its okay. This album just sounds a bit to planned, all their previous albums flow naturally, they seem like a true expression of the band at each time, whereas this, sounds a little forced, like an album made for the sake of making an album rather than recording something that they had been needing to express. To make an unfortunatly floydian analogy, this is a 'division bell' album, its like they've tried to instil and mix together what was good from previous albums and to me they've produced a lot of songs that I wish they'd done more with. This album feels like a compromise was made between okay computer and kid A , which means it doesn't really live up to either. All of the songs on this album are short by prog standards and are not really interrealated in any way, I listened to the 1st song on this album and thought 'this is pretty good' but then it basically carries on in the same way for another 13 songs. Picked out on their own, in a playlist this songs are good but theres not enough variation and not enough songs have been fully explored or broken into any major experimentation. for a fan its pretty essential to get this album and its pretty good but for a newcomer I would recommend Ok-computer as an album roughly in the middle of RH's stylistic range.