The lyrical themes from ' Palo Alto' to ' Pearly' all mirror the content on the A-sides making it the ideal spiritual analgesic for your mental anguish and whetstone to sharpen your grey matter. 'A Reminder' stirs all kinds of feelings based on your emotional susceptibility and ties in with the band’s musical exploration of transportation and urban alienation. There’s plenty of good music in the B-sides too to keep the overzealous archivists happy. Radiohead could have been just another band from the 90s who composed hollow anthems for the empty-minded but by taking the road less travelled by, they have made all the difference. It’s a sentimental track that again doesn't seem to fit in with their reputation as purveyors of elegiac ballads. The fabled ' Lift' was shelved in the archives for 20 years due to Radiohead’s fear of commercial success.
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'Man of War' sounds like it was written for a Sean Connery movie where two British secret agents team up to stop a mad scientist bent on destroying the world with a weather-changing machine. The acoustic guitar and a marching drum beat in ' I Promise' make for a pretty conventional melody and for a while, you are reminded of a certain Cameron Crowe film where John Cusack holds a boombox over his head, until Thom Yorke's towering lonely falsetto takes over. But you could see why these relatively upbeat and straightforward tracks did not belong in 1997’s OK Computer. The three new tracks ' I Promise', 'Man Of War', and 'Lift' are timely inclusions to Radiohead's timeless canon of work. 'Karma Police' is perhaps best described by Pitchfork's Stuart Berman who compares the experience to sitting through a Sean Spicer press conference.įrom the manifest political malaise in ' Electioneering' and the unsettling internal conflict in ' Climbing Up The Walls' to the utter futility of the so-called American Dream in ' No Surprises' and a flicker of optimism in ' Lucky', the album concludes perfectly in an epilogue-cum-prologue in ' The Tourist'. ' Let Down' is the single biggest cause of Stendhal Syndrome (or colloquially known as art attack) amongst Radiohead fans and makes for a better “bittersweet symphony” than the offering of a certain Wigan-based band. “Kicking squealing Gucci little piggy” is more than a trendy online catchphrase and the song remains a lasting scrutiny of the human condition despite the panic and the vomit. There is calmness between Jonny Greenwood's sonic decadence and there is hope despite the resentment towards the alienating effects of technology. Sandwiched between ' Airbag' and the whimsical ' Subterranean Homesick Alien', lies a condemnation of capitalism and commercialism in the disorienting ' Paranoid Android'.