"As Yorke put it in Meeting People Is Easy: "English people aren't impressed. There's this automatic assumption that any degree of success means that you've cheated. Or you're full of shit.
That's a cross Thom no longer has to bear, since whatever shit he was full of was kicked out of him-- in his hometown, no less-- one night in 2000. Like Johnny, the similarly bloodied main character from Mike Leigh's Naked, the assault appears to have Thom dealing with reality for possibly the first time."
"For those of you who are really into the experimental work the band has been putting out, namely in the last couple of years with records like Kid A and Amnesiac, then you'll welcome this release with widely open arms and you'll embrace like a cold but loving robot that beats its way into your musical heart with slicing guitar riffs, acoustic undercurrents, hypnotic beats mixed with traditional drumming, and so much atmosphere you could breath in it."
"Hail to the Thief's big drawback has less to do with its similarity to its predecessor than the sense that Radiohead's famed gloominess is becoming self-parodic. Its bleakness - expressed in fragmentary, elliptical lyrics - seems to hold the album back."
"Radiohead's latest is concerned with sadness and joy and the inbetween. There's a sense throughout the hour it plays out that the lamps are going out all over the world, and that they will not be lit again for some time."
Fan site.
"Radiohead have tempered their more outlandish excursions and shoehorned them into a far more accessible template"
Another fan site
"Hail is filled with images of monstrous, Orwellian force from which there is no escape"
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