If there’s a metaphor to be found for Radiohead’s ninth studio recording, it’s within the hushed, reimagined tones of the record’s final song, “True Love Waits” (versions of which have been bouncing around the band’s setlists and live recordings since the mid-’90s). As longtime producer Nigel Godrich—behind the boards for this album as well—has said, it could’ve been recorded for any number of LPs after The Bends and made to “sound like John Mayer. Nobody wants that.” Instead, Thom Yorke takes a fairly straightforward acoustic tune about the primal need for love and twists it inward like a knife, replacing strummy guitars with a spare piano sequence that morphs into ripples and waves of tangled keyboards, building up to its crescendo (“Don’t leave, don’t leave”) in a manner more evocative of dread than hope: “This is a low-flying panic attack … the damage is done … there’s nowhere to hide … you’ve really messed up everything … the panic is coming on strong … broken hearts make it rain … come to me before it’s too late.”
This is but a sampling of the kind of lyrical fretting to which Yorke gives voice throughout the record, set to the sort of organic, largely acoustic backdrops that wouldn’t have been out of place for Nick Drake circa Five Leaves Left, with Jonny Greenwood taking his film-score stringwork to new sophisticated heights as orchestras and chorales swoop, dive and shudder around each verse and chorus like birds of prey playing with their quarry. It should be clear to one and all by now, but given the lengthy gaps that have begun to appear between releases (four years-plus between Hail To The Thief, In Rainbows, King Of Limbs and now this), Radiohead is what happens when Yorke’s singular undeniable voice is mashed up with Greenwood’s gift for ornamentation and arrangement, and the patience they’ve demonstrated by finally tracking definitive versions of older tracks such as “Burn The Witch,” “Present Tense,” “Identikit” and “The Numbers” (previously known as “Silent Spring”) shows more of a stubborn commitment to perfection of mood and memory than it does to some OCD-inspired “cleaning of the closet.” True love really does wait. This is Radiohead’s deepest, darkest pool of devotion and doubt in a career marked by almost nothing but.
—Corey duBrowa
