New Yorker article on Radiohead  While browsing through some old New Yorker magazines, I came across a June 26, 2006 article by their excellent music critic Sasha Frere-Jones entitled Fine Tuning: Reassessing Radiohead. It's a good overview of Radiohead's career and surprisingly good review of their latest recording In Rainbows over a year before the release this October:

The band is recording a new album, and on its current tour is trying out at least twelve new songs. Several reprise the hushed, hypnotic mood of “Amnesiac” (2001) and “Hail to the Thief” (2003). The lovely “Videotape,” which invokes death and Mephistopheles (Yorke opens with “When I’m at the pearly gates, this’ll be on my videotape”), slowly ramps up and then down, the guitars and the drums bobbing around Yorke’s piano chords, emphasizing different beats of the rhythm, as if three songs were slowly becoming one.

Sasha (for some reason I always thought of him as a her but now know better) also was prescient in his comments about the recording:

Radiohead no longer has a contract with EMI and says that it has no plans to sign with a label. However the band chooses to release its next record, it can still make a handsome living by touring and selling merchandise. Labels spend a lot of time and money worrying about illegal downloading and file-sharing. What they should be worried about is more bands like Radiohead, which could make major labels a relic of the twentieth century.

posted by Bruce Wright at 11:24 AM #