Musing

If you dismiss this album after the first track as a poor-man's Oasis, you've fooled yourself out of something pretty special here. You only have to go one track farther into the album to hear something that heavy-handed Noel would have never allowed onto an Oasis album. I would have been shocked to hear any of these tracks on Oasis-LP8 barring four. There's a sense of variety-with-cohesion that was lacking in Dig Out Your Soul . More importantly, it makes up for another lack in the last Oasis album: production. High quality VBR MP3's of DGSS sound better than listening to DOYS on CD or vinyl; I don't want to see Dave Sardy's name in the liner notes for any album ever again. I'm excited to hear the whole thing at CD quality in a couple of weeks!

Well. That was not "In Rainbows: Part II". Yorke sings in much the same way that he did for IR, but it's over an electric mix that sounds like Amnesiac on steroids. Sounds like a blinding endorsement, but that first 15-20 minutes of frenetic toe-tapping starts to wear a little thin about halfway through "Little By Little." The back half is definitely slower. Maybe that was the intention - an uptempo first half and a more relaxed second half. Instant favorite? "Codex" is gorgeous. It has rightfully been called "Pyramid Song V2.0." It's too soon to talk about TKOL's rank amongst other Radiohead albums, but of their 8 albums, it's currently somewhere in the middle. The physical release might correct a couple of rough spots in the MP3's, and holding the so-called Newspaper Album might add some of the magic that strangely seems to be missing now.