LICC - Hail to the Thief

hail to the thief

Thom Yorke's lyrics inhabit a troubled, twilight zone - like those moments, perhaps, when you're falling asleep but drifting into a nightmare; when you can sense fear, but you can't tell quite what it is you're afraid of. "It is now the witching hour," he mumbles. "Your alarm bells should be ringing. This is the gloaming."
'The Gloaming' was, in fact, the working title for Radiohead's sixth album, released this week; however 'Hail to the Thief' (a scornful American term for George Bush, used in the opening song) won the day, perhaps because it helped to focus a more abstract, melancholic recording that was completed during the invasion of Iraq.
A pervading sense of unease is rarely made more specific in the 14 new songs; there are some political hints ("Maybe you'll be president/But know right from wrong"), but instead the band sketch murky shapes of the monsters and murderers who stalk the world we fear, and fear for. We know that global forces seem threatening, but it's hard to say who or what the enemy is. The war on terrorism has no perceptible target, but neither, it seems, does any war on poverty. Liberal democracy has never felt so impotent at home, yet we unleash it abroad with cluster bombs. Yorke's temptation is to curl into a ball: "I'm gonna go to sleep and let this wash over me." After all, what can he do? "We're rotten fruit, damaged goods... One gust and we will probably crumble."
And yet, there is a tremulous hope: "I'm hanging off a branch/I'm teetering on the brink" sings Yorke in 'Backdrifts' - but he is still hanging. "I won't let this happen to my children," he promises more defiantly in 'I Will'.
What 'this' is, we'll never know. It may be pointless to search for too much clarity within the gloaming. But when one reviewer suggests the band uses sadness 'as an emotion of engagement', we may be getting warmer. Like a psalm of lament, their music is not purely introspective; it demands change, even if it might not ever happen.
Ultimately, Yorke's lyrics elude rational analysis, spewing instead like the bewildering sleep talk of a disturbed man. Yet it's the melancholic beauty of the Radiohead sound that moves so many people. It defies neat explanation; but then so, too, does our world.

Brian Draper

yorke's lyrics inhabit a troubled, twilight zone
like a psalm of lament,
their music demands change,
even if it might not ever happen