I’ll Never Take It Personally: My Love Affair with Radiohead

by John Vanderslice


Every moment of Hail to the Thief is heightened and meaningful to me. I’ve clocked in a hundred or so hours on my Grado headphones trying to decode this strange and dark record.

While Hail to the Thief is perfectly in arc with the deconstructions of Kid A and Amnesiac, Yorke’s elevated presence here tempers some of the more experimental tendencies of the band. His melody lines are again the focus of the songs, and they more often dictate structure and tone. Gone are the effects that placed his voice as another treated instrument: no varispeed, digital scrubbing, or obvious cut and paste.

Yorke is in stunning form, especially heartbreaking in the sparser, down tempo songs on the record. In “I Will,” a father’s stand against Armageddon, his piercing plea is set against a lone electric guitar and a swelling chorus of falsetto backing vocals. Yorke’s voice in “Scatterbrain” is drenched in a gorgeous echo chamber, and it’s not until a delayed vocal starts folding back on the song that I remember how destabilizing this band can be.

There is so much beauty and invention in these recordings that just processing the confounding textures and unknowable landscapes is a creative act.

A case in point: underneath the opening drum beat of “There there” a washed cymbal sounds a continuous C#. After a few measures, bass and detuned guitar establishes the key of Bm, setting the washed tone a whole step above the tonic, giving us one of the most dissonant and tense intervals, a 2nd. This harmonic confusion continues throughout the song, and reinforces the terminally bleak tone of the lyrics.

I could on like this for pages, but there are things to do, word counts to heed…