In Rainbows by Radiohead

As I write this, I am listening to Radiohead's latest album, In Rainbows, for the tenth time since it came out five days ago (yeah, I keep track of those things). Maybe it's the four year wait since their last album, the much-maligned but secretly awesome Hail to the Thief; maybe it's the fact that Radiohead is one of my all-time favorite bands; maybe it's the presence of the long-gestating "Nude." But whatever it is, this is one of those albums that I want to listen to again as soon as I finish it; in fact, I often want to listen to it again while I'm still listening to it the first time.

For the first ten or twenty seconds, it sounds as if the band has picked up where Thom Yorke's solo album left off: we begin with a warbly 5/4 electronic beat, which transitions into an actual Phil Selway drum beat. Then, at about the forty second mark, the guitar drops in and you're reminded that, oh yeah, Radiohead is awesome. They may have a lot of computers lying around the studio, but they're also pretty darn good at playing their instruments, as is evidenced by Colin Greenwood's bass lines later in the song. One track in, you're going to be glad you paid whatever you decided to pay for this variably-priced album.

If there's one word that describes this album, it's "ethereal." The few moments of uninhibited rocking notwithstanding - most notably "Bodysnatchers" - the album's primary focus is atmospherics, more so than any past Radiohead release. The songs are generally mellow, meandering and wrapped in strings.

The production is also the cleanest of any Radiohead album yet. Gone is the ubiquitous hum of computer glitchiness and detuned radios buzzing; gone is the knob-twiddling that normally make Selway's drums sound like, you know, not drums; gone is the Mac voice saying things like, "I may be paranoid, but not an android." This not a White Stripes album, to be sure, but it's about as bare bones and stripped-down as Radiohead can muster. As a result of this production, you can actually hear empty space. Rather than plug every square inch of the album with sonic gadgetry, the band has allowed the songs room to breathe; Ed O'Brien even plays actual notes on some of these songs. It's also, maybe, their warmest album to date. Make no mistake, alienation is still a key ingredient ("Don't get any big ideas/They're not going to happen"), but the album is alienated with you, not at you.

What's most amazing about this album is how captivating it manages to be without much tonal shift. "Bodysnatchers" offers the album's one plain-faced rock and/or roll moment, a classic rock riff wrapped up in the Radiohead aesthetic, and "Jigsaw Falling Into Place" - "The Trickster" by way of "Knives Out" - gets the juices flowing; the rest of the tracks seem like the ballad you'd find between two rocking songs. Even "Reckoner," one of the loudest and most energetic songs in its original, 2001 incarnation, has mutated into a mid-tempo groove here. The album rarely drops into sheer balladry, the gorgeous "Nude" and the White Album-plucked "Faust Arp" being the exceptions; instead, it simmers on the edge of an explosion that never comes. The bulk of the songs threaten to explode into a three-guitar-and-strings song-along chorus at any moment, but never do.

What's on display throughout the album is the sheer number of things to which Radiohead need not resort to write a good song: the production is relatively spare; the structures are simple, often lacking even distinct verses and choruses; screaming guitars, loud-soft shifts and repeated refrains are conspicuously absent. No disrespect to the classic "Paranoid Android," one of the greatest songs ever written, but the Radiohead of In Rainbows would never write a six-minute, multi-sectioned epic of manic time-shifts, overlapping sound effects and blistering guitar solos. They'd rather drop a few piano chords and a plaintive melody in your lap, and wring from them every ounce of available beauty before abandoning them.

Perhaps this album is a shot across the bow of every band that's made a living aping The Bends and OK Computer, all those bands who think you can be Radiohead by throwing some sound effects and twinkly guitar layers on top of songs about not having any friends. Stripped of artifice and grandiosity, In Rainbows proves beyond any doubt that Radiohead's brilliance lies not in their frenetic production nor that piece of paper with Nigel Godrich's phone number on it, but in their sheer brilliance.