IN RAINBOWS

Quite interesting to know how Radiohead has made a breakthrough on how the music is distributed to its fans and listeners. It's probably a breakthrough marketing and distribution strategy that marketing guru like Phillip Kottler should give an appreciation to the band. Radiohead have made their album In Rainbows initially only through download, and a special edition box set featuring 8 bonus tracks and the album on double vinyl will be released in December while regular CD would not be available until January 2008. This kind of distribution strategy has created discussion among mailing lists and music forum and in itself has become a marketing gimmick. It's quite revolutionary, actually. With this creative mind, it's normal for the music lovers to expect something radical in terms of music style comes out from the album. Unfortunately, it's not. I even thought that the band made radical distribution strategy to position themselves differently from other competitors so that people would get excited and curious to know "how the music would radically change?".

Let's talk musically. I don't think that this new album by Radiohead is somewhat different in terms of style than previous releases. However this album refreshes our mind with some interesting "unstructured" arrangements throughout its composition. I think this is why Radiohead has been categorized as "prog" band. The opening track "15 Step" is actually not a catchy track to grab but it provides a bit another look of disco music mixed with Radiohead roots. For me, it's hard to get catchy elements from this album, but if you have a passion to explore musical experiments, it would help you digest the album in its entirety. There are elements of psychedelic as well as ambient pop music. I believe the band has distilled their musical thoughts in such a way that produces an album that is relatively difficult to absorb (not in its complexity but more on the unstructured nature of its composition) but creates a willingness to re-spin. That's actually what I feel about this album. I might have been influenced by the band's radical distribution strategy?

Overall, this is a good album like previous one. However, this is much less attractive to the band's seminal and prog album OK COMPUTER which has "Paranoid Android" as the best song that Radiohead has ever created (my view). This album serves well for those who have open mind or fans of the band so far. Keep on proggin' ..!

Peace on earth and mercy mild - GW

Share this RADIOHEAD review

Social review comments () BETA

---

---

Review related links

• Send comments to Gatot
• Report this review (#148236)
• Buy RADIOHEAD music online with PA partners
• Show all RADIOHEAD MP3/Stream
• Go to RADIOHEAD page for videos, full discography with ratings, reviews and much more
• Go to In Rainbows page for more details, where to buy and ratings/reviews
• Search the Forum for RADIOHEAD related discussions