True confession time: I've never heard a complete Radiohead album in my life. Seriously. I just don't seek that shit out. It's just really not my thing, soI don't bother, except... A few years ago, there I was, reclining in the Brinks-like tomb of Fort Snob, lecturing a select crowd of stuffed animals about the proper maintenance of my Borbetomagus collection, safe in the knowledge that I was the undisputed lord of a Radiohead-free zone (and for a while, such spaces were all too rare), when-- ninja-like, with a stealthy flutter of jazz piano chords and tumbling snares-- in crept That Voice singing a melody so goddamn gorgeous that Fort Snob kinda caved in and went all mushy inside. I jumped into the river, and black-eyed angels swam me to an obsidian necropolis where The One Great Radiohead Song lies dead but dreaming. It was a painful episode and I'd rather not talk about it; here at the Yorke-Greenwood Institute for Recovering Music Snobs we're told to take it one day at a time.

- Drew Daniel

Such is our love for Radiohead that "Creep", instead of haunting the band well into their sine-wave phase, has been-- in a rare show of fanboy magnanimity--quietly dismissed as juvenilia. That's too bad, actually, because it contains more than a germ of the Radiohead to come. The song's biggest hook, for instance, was not the Explosive Chorus (a sad cliche by 1993) but the two terrifying string slaps that preceded it: A device so simple it had every guitarist in the world surprised how in the hell hadn't they thought of it first. On "There There", Radiohead manage to top themselves in the same department: the nervous center of the song is, unbelievably, a drum fill. You know which one: it ends the tune. Composed of two robotic, Dave Grohl-style snare rolls, three 16th-notes each, it sounds almost exactly like Greenwood's "Creep" figure; the rest of the song is so accomplished it's a yawn to describe-- a gorgeous vocal singing about a siren singing you to shipwreck (!), terrifically twisty changes, complicated yet totally lucid mix-- but it's this weird little self-salute reaching from 2003 to 1993 that makes it, well, perfect.

- Michael Idov

Wow, what an album.

It must be tough being Radiohead, though. Recording and releasing OK Computer, perhaps the most universally acclaimed album since Sgt. Pepper, did all sorts of weird things to Thom Yorke’s head. A head, let’s not forget, that was not in the best nick to begin with.

In what may be the boldest attempt at career suicide ever, Kid A and Amnesiac followed, two albums of stark, European electronica, that gained Radiohead a whole new audience but bewildered and alienated their existing one. Then there was a live record made up of, er, stark, European electronica. No one bought it.

Hail to the Thief is not the return to OK Computer-like grandeur that pre-release reports suggested, although there are definitely hints of that. Instead, Hail to the Thief veers happily between OK Computer’s sweeping atmospheres and the clipped robotics of Kid A and Amnesiac, sometimes within the same piece of music.

Of course, there aren’t many tunes, or anything. But, to be fair, Radiohead haven’t consistently written “songs” since The Bends. The whole verse-chorus-verse thing was ditched long ago in favour of sound textures, and Hail to the Thief generally continues that trend.

True, the single ‘There There’ almost sounds like a conventional song, but there’s a sense that it happened by accident rather than design (“You think it sounds like a single? You’re joking, aren’t you?”), and it ends up coming across like U2 circa Achtung Baby (that’s a good thing, in case you were wondering).

Whether that’s down to Nigel Godrich, nominally Radiohead’s producer since OK Computer, is hard to say. Given Yorke’s reported unwillingness to let anyone else tell him what to do and Jonny Greenwood’s ability to get a sound out of absolutely anything, you wonder what Godrich actually does.

Christopher O’Riley bills himself as a musical Renaissance man. I find this slightly immodest. Let’s look at his résumé. He was trained as a classical pianist at the New England Conservatory. Then he flirted with jazz, became an “expert” on tango, and now he hosts a radio show and writes solo piano arrangements of songs by Radiohead and Elliott Smith.

I’m sure there are a lot of people in the world like this. They grow up thinking they like one thing, and then they decide that they like something else better. They can’t go to school to study Radiohead, so they study Bach and Brahms to get their classical education. When they’re in their 30s, they break out into the world of pop with their inspired classical arrangements of their and everybody else’s favorite tunes, trying to legitimize them into the canonical framework.

I must admit, I had fallen prey to his allure. I assumed that whoever this Christopher O’Riley was, his concert would be really interesting to listen to. I figured that if the University of Chicago Presents was putting on this concert, he was guaranteed to be good. He was a classical pianist, and he was going to be playing his own arrangements of Radiohead songs. Since I like Radiohead, I was curious to see what a classically trained pianist would do with the material. I was expecting fugues, variations, and so forth.

It turned out, however, that I’d made something of an error. I had supposed that someone classically trained on the piano would be smart enough about music to be able to tastefully arrange a few pop songs for his chosen instrument. But apparently this is not the case with O’Riley.

What was touring with Radiohead like?

It was great to see a band who's talented, unflinching, and passionate get up onstage and just enjoy the situation for what it was: a stinkin' rock show. They taught me to not take myself so seriously. Despite how heavy you think your "art" is—it's just music.

There is a Radiohead song called Airbag which says that every time you get out of a car you should celebrate that you are alive. I felt that getting off the plane. But it fired me up for the trip. I thought, I’m going to learn as much as I can and meet as many people as possible.

Radiohead
We're sure we're just ignorant folks who 'don't get it.' We're sure there's some kind of deeper meaning. That being said, radiohead.com, to anyone who isn't either insane, a performance artist, or both, is a confusing, worthless, mess. With dozens of buttons that lead to nowhere, users must navigate a matrix of pictures and words, each of which will take you further away from anything you may be trying to find out. Most people will just give up, and you really can't blame them. The band should take Elliott Smith's lead and just hand over the official reins to their best fan site, in this case, ateaseweb.com.

They haven't made a brilliant album since OK Computer or even a truly significant one since its follow up, Kid A. Thom Yorke Jonny Greenwood, and the gang need to either take the guitars back out of the closet or, conversely, make a straight-up electronic disc.

What they've been doing lately- creating a mushy middle ground between those two styles- isn't working. It's also about time Yorke took a cue from late '90's Michael Stipe and started penning more direct, less obtuse lyrics.

It's 2005, but for a critic, last year hasn't ended yet. Here are some 2004 albums that deserve notice before turning the calendar page.

Radiohead: Artiness looms when the DVD The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time (www.radiohead.com) is subtitled Twenty-four Short Films With Music by Radiohead (When did music videos become short films, anyway?).

The DVD is part scrapbook, part video demo reel. Fans sent clips to Radiohead's Web site, and the band added its homemade video, including unreleased music and informal performances. It's an analog lovefest of grainy images, strobing and hand-drawn animation, as the fans reflect the vertigo and anomie of the songs. Now Radiohead can never claim to be misunderstood.

01. Paranoid Android (4)
08. Street Spirit (Fade Out) (9)
17. Fake Plastic Trees (34)
21. Creep (13)
26. Idioteque (24)
32. Just' (17)
66. The Bends (New entry)