“Back so soon?”
I guess in this “beast” form, so to speak, I’m hoping to live this other life I’d put off. There’s something about your world crashing down around you that makes the words flow.
Here’s an album I will be listening to for the next long while. What’s taken me so long to write about music on here, I don’t know. Took a fire under my ass, and a flan in the face, but here we go...
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In 2012, a young Cal discovered Radiohead’s OK Computer. He’d graduated from the kiddie table (a year of Coldplay on repeat) to… that corner of the room where the silent and neighbor’s-kid types would hang—yeah, maybe a worse place to be. The album would soundtrack long, rainy summer nights playing Minecraft on Creative Mode.
You’d probably imagine I would move on to something like In Rainbows or Kid A, but no. For some reason, I thought Hail to the Thief, the “mixed bag” record in the Radiohead catalogue, was the logical next step.
Over the years, I’d come to the opinion that basically reflects consensus 1:1: It’s a collection of songs that are essential listens in themselves, but simply okay as an album front-to-back. Radiohead have crafted better (legendary, out-of-this-world!) experiences in their albums. For me, nostalgia has painted it in a slightly better light, but again, it has remained middle-of-the-road… until now.
I picked up the record again today after years of cycling through pretty much everything else, even Pablo Honey very briefly (it’s actually okay if you have a sweet-tooth), and let it soundtrack my bike commute through rush hour in the metro. The cover depicts a similar picture—a bird’s eye view of a city indulged in artifice. It is visceral, disorienting, sludge seemingly oozing from within the canvas—much like the record’s contents, much like the world around me, much like the world now in me.
It clicked in a way it hadn’t before. Hail to the Thief is undoubtedly Radiohead’s angriest record—penned, recorded, and released in the wake of 9/11 and the onset of the war in Iraq. I’ve put anger to the side for a long while now… “You are only allowed to feel happy,” I would tell myself. “The pandemic is over. Sadness is over. You are with people again, and you can have fun with them forever.”
I think we forget that anger can be good. Anger is catharsis, it’s noise, it is a pressure valve—in the best of cases, it’s a conduit for justice. “Your anger is a gift,” as the old proverb goes. Oftentimes anger instead manifests toxically, particularly in our modern discourse, leaving no discernible good in the path it forges.
Hail to the Thief is an incredible cocktail of pain, sadness, British sardonicism—regular ingredients for Radiohead, of course—and unadulterated anger, which was somewhat absent for a while up to the point of the record’s release, arguably since OK Computer. Course percussion in analog and digital form abrases the eardrums, backing Thom Yorke’s frantic cries for change. The crunch of distorted guitars lurk in every nook and cranny—a return to form for the band coming off the heels of the electronic masterpiece Kid A and the sometimes svelte, sometimes sterile Amnesiac. It now serves as a return to form for myself.
What I once thought was its weakness, the album’s flow, now feels natural, an eventuality and faithful representation of the band’s artistic vision. Interspersed throughout the album are several low moments—“Sail to the Moon”, “We Suck Young Blood”, “I Will”—more than your typical record. I once perceived these as disruptions, annoying little moments for Thom Yorke to whine in trudging pseudo-ballad form. I’ve come to appreciate these—they’re necessary, simmering down the anger, distilling it to a bitterer, flatter cynicism, before things ramp up again. It’s brilliant.
Whether you’re a seasoned vet, or want to get into the band, if you want to feel that catharsis of anger again, I give you this unconventional but unique listen. There isn’t anything like it. There is a wild, thrashing tide of emotion here, the likes of which I haven’t ridden for a long time. Let’s see where it goes.