KEY POINTS:
Herald Rating: * * * * *
Label: Download
Verdict: Brit art-rock heroes' seventh offering worth every penny
About now Radiohead's new album should be provoking a strange feeling. No, not the panic of a music industry who might see the album's honesty box download mode of delivery as the greatest blunder in rock'n'roll accounting since the Colonel handed Elvis a pen.
And no, it's not the habitual confusion which followed the English band's increasingly tangential releases in the wake of pinnacle album, 1997's OK Computer. By the time of 2003's Hail to the Thief frontman Thom Yorke seemed to have become a sulky caricature, though he largely redeemed himself last last year on his Eraser solo set.
No, that strange feeling induced by In Rainbows is guilt - well at least those who skimped on payment for its 10 songs should be feeling some pangs of conscience about now.
Especially as they realise it's Radiohead's best album in quite some time, so is well worth rattling the tin for. (Me? I paid a little over the odds, mainly out of guilt for previous review freebies and due to my usual miscalculation of exchange rates. But if the band is considering putting us on their world tour next year, us heavy tippers might swing things).
Considering its four-year creation, the fact they're virtually giving it away, and the risk that Eraser had purloined some of Yorke's best tunes of recent times, the first real surprise of In Rainbows is how assured it all sounds.
It's not the scattershot experimentalism of Kid A or Amnesiac or the big caustic howl of Hail to the Thief, but is an album which reins in its askew rhythms, fizzing electronics and elegant guitars, and lets the songs breathe deep.
That's right from the start with the whiplash roll of the R&B-styled 15 Steps which employs screaming kids, warm jazzy guitar and a intermittent bass to brilliant effect. The feverish mood is maintained by the fuzz-thrills of Bodysnatchers before In Rainbows heads for more dreamy territory. And whether Yorke's falsetto is getting itself all worked up on the soul-shaped Nude, the delicate Reckoner or entreating through the Massive Attack-meets-Sigur Ros symphonies of All I Need, he sounds like a man whose angst levels are out of the red zone. True, he's going on about collapsing infrastructures on the House of Cards and contemplating his mortality on Weird Fishes/Arpeggi and Videotape, but he's sounding - as the old song goes - fitter, happier.
That sense of optimism - not a word you bandy around lightly in Radiohead reviews - shines through on this tremendous album, even in its darkest corners. Able to be got on the cheap yes, but In Rainbows feels truly priceless.
