Albums by this artist

With its sixth studio album, Hail To The Thief, Radiohead doesn't really make the rumored return to its earlier soaring ballads and crushing guitar anthems. Instead, the 14-track follow-up to the Oxford quintet's Kid A/Amnesiac sessions mixes The Bends-era stadium rock with the skittering beats of the past two albums, all of which lands Radiohead squarely in musical purgatory -- at least for now.

There are, undoubtedly, moments on Thief that recapture the trenchant emotion of 1997's critically acclaimed OK Computer. The album opens with thrashing lead guitarist and gadget-guru Jonny Greenwood juicing up for "2 + 2 = 5," a driving Orwellian indictment of political tyrants and snoozing masses. "You have not been paying attention," frontman Thom Yorke inveighs as the track's growling riff chugs to its climax. "Don't question my authority," he keens, before a manic siren of synth carries this opening polemic to its sudden halt.

That taut, frenetic power resurfaces in the second half of the next track, "Sit Down, Stand Up," which rides an imperious piano progression from its opening atonal threats to a fusillade of raindrops that recall the repetitive urgency of Kid A's "Idioteque."

However, the album's most startling moments come when the band drops its Warp Records-inspired electronica, which feels conceptually tired and overwrought next to the pared-down beauty of such hopeful adagios as "Sail To The Moon" and "I Will." It's on "Sail" that Radiohead revives the heart-rending emotional core of scaled-back compositions like "Pyramid Song" and "You And Whose Army?" Elsewhere, "I Will" mines gossamer strains of three-part harmonies that replenish and reassure the listener while simultaneously forecasting a vague sense of doom.

Equally affecting and arguably more ambitious is the album's closer, "A Wolf At The Door," which, with its stream-of-consciousness Id rap, falls stylistically somewhere between Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and Eminem's "Lose Yourself." By track's end, Yorke has deftly straddled a pop-cultural spectrum of dread, spanning everything from the Stepford wives and the taxman to X-ray eyes and giant cranes. The snapshots of violence underscoring Greenwood's otherwise blithe arpeggios pit hope against despair, not unlike the meld of childlike chimes and torturous daily ritual evident on "No Surprises." Still, as the album's swan song, "Wolf" should provide some thematic coda, not an assemblage of loosely knit horrors and threats.

But there are deeper problems than the album's inconclusive wrap-up. Thief lacks any real connective sound or statement throughout, and instead hovers inconclusively between snippets of blistering fury and the static-laced arrhythmia of the band's more recent efforts. The result is a hopscotch between one-footed forays (techno retreads "The Gloaming" and "Backdrifts") and the two-footed assuredness of structured tunes and ensemble songcraft ("A Punchup At A Wedding," "Go To Sleep").

When the album does glint with ferocity, it can't help also feeling stalled by the band's stabs at currency, which at best imbue the proceedings with politically provocative grist, but at worst render Thief a dated historical document with moments of inspired genius.

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JEREMY HORELICK |