Realizations in the New Year

You know, all this time I thought I was avoiding the Cult of Gmail and today I realized I actually have not one but two gmail accounts? How do these things happen? In coming to this realization, I also realized that two dozen-some bands have written to me at an email address I never use to get me to post their tracks. If any of those bands are reading, I'm really sorry.

Other things I've realized: certain people seem to be ashamed to admit how much they like the new Radiohead album. So let's talk about that for a minute. I understand the indie impulse to be wary of praising a juggernaut like Radiohead. We've all been hurt before. We've all bought one REM album too many or worse, championed an album, let's call it "New Adventures in Hi-Fi" as their best work since "Green", only to have "Up" come along and tear one leg out from under our arguments, followed by "Reveal", which made the whole REM project indefensible. U2 put people in a similar situation, putting out a series of post-"Achtung" albums that were simultaneously defensible or reprehensible, depending on the company you kept.

And for many of us, we'd watched Radiohead being born, in a strangely lit "120 Minutes" concert-style video of screeching falsetto and alienation that would put Morrissey to shame. We'd seen the brash adolescence of "The Bends" grow into the confident concept album swagger of "OK Computer", and the strange creeping growth of "Kid A" and "Amnesiac". We'd watched a band constantly pushing...something. I mean, let's face it, they were never really experimental, they were just brilliant at incorporating fringe elements into essentially pop songs and crafting albums that sustained a narrative for forty-plus minutes. They didn't reinvent the wheel, they just strapped four of them together with a stronger engine and smoother transmission than most bands could muster.

Arriving at "In Rainbows", we're finding out that Radiohead was building a luxury car all along (I'm stealing this analogy from 33 1/3's David Barker) and is inviting us for a ride. Down the road, the threat of a fully adult contemporary album looms and the desire to be first among the haters, the avant garde of dislike, has its draws. But rather than distributing faint praise in hushed tones, I think it's time to salve the old wounds and appreciate that every now and then, talent and commercial success are completely coincident. "In Rainbows" has everything in its right place, Thom Yorke exhibits scalpel sharp control of both his voice and his lyrics and Jonny Greenwood, who is the Hardest Working Man in Things That Aren't Rock and Roll (check out his score for "There Will Be Blood" or last year's "Jonny Greenwood is the Controller" on Trojan Recs if you don't follow me) builds out beautiful playgrounds for Yorke's vocals to slide through. This album makes me want to smoke pot or drink wine or make out or nod off or rock out or write blog entries again.

Tomorrow, some notes on the new Magnetic Fields. Later in the week, a review of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol comics, which have been keeping me away from "Anna Karenina" all week, dammit. And at some point, a post originally intended for the much smarter blog Probably Awkward on Julie Taymor's compelling awful "Across the Universe", which was both the perfect Beatles movie and the worst film I saw in 2007.