Radiohead - The best of

Rating: * * *

With Radiohead departing EMI to scare the music industry with their DIY sales methods for last year's brilliant In Rainbows, inevitably the band's old label has gone into fire-sale mode.

Their back catalogue is now available individually on iTunes while there is also is 29-track slice through the band's six albums and one previously unreleased track, the acoustic ballad True Love Waits.

All of which might sound generous enough, a nice way to perhaps contemplate the band's remarkable musical progress from their breakthrough anthem of sulkdom, Creep, to the grandiose likes of Paranoid Android to their wanderings into electronic-influenced experimentalism of the Kid A and Amnesiac years.

But with a non-chronological tracklistings and nothing in the way of accompanying history to put any of all this music into context, it feels like a very basic best-of for a very complex career thus far.

And it's one that suggests from its tracklisting that the label didn't much like anything the band did after its 1997 magnum opus Ok Computer - arguably, stripping anything off that perfect Radiohead album is a bit pointless, as its songs will forever work as one of rock's great suites.

But then again this best-of is shoddy and ill-defined enough that it won't stop late-comers buying those original albums. They still come highly recommended;  this abridged version doesn't much. 

Russell Baillie