Radiohead: Box Set

Email Printer friendly version Normal font Large font Bernard Zuel, reviewer

December 14, 2007

Even those who already have the seven Radiohead albums won't be able to resist the shiny new packaging

Can't say for sure but this may well have been what was being muttered in the offices of EMI in London quite recently:

"Hey, you want to be super modern and make your new album available as a download instead of releasing it through the record company who fed you, bathed you and made you rather well off, thank you very much? Well, take this. In the same month that you release a box set of your new material, we're going to release a box set of your old material. All of your albums. Which we still own by the way. With original artwork, no extra tracks, no rarities, no liner notes. Because we can. But just in case you think we are fuddy-duddies, we're not just making them available as a download, we are putting them out on a USB memory stick too. You think you own the modern world? We're there baby, we're there."

Let's set aside the tit-for-tat timing (which is petty but not necessarily unfair and certainly economically sensible in the pre-Christmas selling season) and even the absence of bonuses for those who already have the seven Radiohead albums but won't be able to resist the shiny new packaging (imagine a Homer-like "hmm, box set!" from any number of nerdy boys, like, um, me).

In simple terms the seven albums chart the course of the band. They were hesitant neophytes, still searching for a consistent, singular identity, almost puppyishly eager to please. Now they are men, having turned their fear or hatred of consistency and their refusal to easily please into an identity, and are a creative and commercial success. In even simpler terms here are two of the most important rock albums of the '90s, two of the key anti-rock rock albums of the turn of the century and a few more that do you no harm at all to have.

Pablo Honey (1993), with its post-Nirvana shapes (check those rolling drums and drenched guitars), is a better than decent but somewhat blurry debut where the final track, Blow Out, points the way forward. The qualities that separate the Oxford quintet from a host of other guitar bands finally flowered in the unfettered emotion underpinning the songs in The Bends (1995) and the fermenting intellect pushing OK Computer (1997).

For all the shock associated with the "ditch the guitars, turn on the machines" approach of Kid A (2000) and the oft-neglected Amnesiac (2001), there is a natural line that can be discerned from The Bends to Hail to The Thief (2003). And that is all the more clear when you explore the excellent live album I Might Be Wrong (2001) where those who doubted the newly hatched glitch electronica could ever match the power of the guitar band and those who had previously avoided the rock aesthetic for its supposed boneheadedness, found there was common ground.

There's nothing new here of course, except an uncommon band. A powerful, contrary, thoughtful, moving and often thrilling band.