Radiohead
Hail to the Thief
Capitol

For all the navel-gazing and Big Important Issues ascribed to Hail to the Thief, the album's most cogent achievement is emotional. Thief only really sparks to life after such distractions are first acknowledged, then dismissed as background. Of course it's political, and of course it continues to merge electronic experimentation with more familiar rock structures; but it employs all those debate-igniting props simply to further the band's more pressing agenda: to tirelessly explore beauty's terrible fragility. This fuse runs through Radiohead's music, behind all the pessimism and paranoia, the only light to redeem and make palatable a pretty relentless dark.

The only other night-light glowing weakly throughout Hail to the Thief is that of childhood. For every little rowboat that went to heaven, for every sleepy Jack roused by morning bells, for all the rats and children following haphazardly along on previous albums, this one nails that trusting vulnerability and its attendant parental terror more often, and more consistently. Lullabies and fairy tales float like ambiguous, narrative wisps, scraps of poisoned candy, as Thom Yorke the new father wrestles with his fears for his son. Amnesia no longer an option, this flotsam bubbles up from the subconscious abyss. Face it: nursery rhymes, Grimm's tales and jump-rope songs are creepy enough in isolation. Here, they are icing sugar doorways into some awful amalgam of both primal and contemporary horrors.

But first, we are diverted through some apparent OK Computer memorabilia. "2+2=5" opens with the reassuring sound of a guitar being plugged in; reassuring because that's never a bad sound, but also because it's slyly funny in light of all the "return to rock" angst that trails the band like strident gulls. Such reassurances are short lived, however. The title's implicit Orwellian theme surfaces once the relatively generous and airy opening bars collapse into a diatribe against our collective apathy in the face of what amounts to a post-Sept. 11, right-wing coup. Because we weren't "paying attention," it's "the devil's way now" and "there's no way out." Spitting in a vocal style reminiscent of an agitated Polly Jean Harvey over a fully unleashed rhythm section, Yorke's indignation only turns away from utter pessimism at the last possible moment — like an existential game of chicken — when he allows "Oh go and tell the king that the sky is falling in/ But it's not.../ Maybe not."

Thematically, "Sit Down, Stand Up" maintains this momentum behind a detached Big Brother threat that "we can wipe you out anytime." More chilling still is the song's metamorphosis into a kind of denial, with drummer Phil Selway picking up the pace in an increasingly feverish flesh-and-blood flurry while Yorke sticks his fingers in his ears and repeats "the raindrops" 46 times, over sniping, old-school arcade game lasers. Appropriately, this childish gesture signals the record's first swerve into that nursery nightmare world where beauty's smile so often hides sharp teeth. "Sail to the Moon" follows, a piano-led echo of Amnesiac's "Pyramid Song," with Yorke's voice soaring and dipping like something not of this earth. The perennial dream that one's children will transcend all the world's ugliness and sorrow is trapped in the crystalline image of someday building an ark, breaking gravity's clutch, and sailing to the moon. Theremin-like howls and quasar blips of space swell and throb as the song fades to inky night, a hint of regret at lost utopian dreams, a sad reminder that we once even dared to have them.

And since arks can't go to the moon, the defiant need to hide in an underground bunker (who's in the bunker?) and await some distant all-clear is horribly poignant in the pure lullaby, "I Will," a three-part harmony of aching beauty with minimal embellishment. Pained sympathy toward the young and innocent also runs through "We Suck Young Blood," a lurching ghoul of a song, barely propped up by all-too sporadic handclaps. The song titles themselves betray childhood's crude stamp: "Sail to the Moon," "Go to Sleep," and "There There" simply sound like lullabies. And whispered talk of monsters taking over, wolves outside doors, dinosaurs roaming the earth, white elephants, falling skies, sitting ducks, snakes and ladders, X-ray eyes and someone being eaten alive (in not one but two songs, and why do parents tell their kids they want to eat them all up, anyway?) suggest all the twisted-love ambivalence we bring to the table of our children's hunger to absorb everything.

But not everything is slow-paced ennui. "Backdrifts" churns and grooves on an electro beat; "Myxomatosis" surges like a dark tide, further evidence that Radiohead has more deftly assimilated its electronic experiments into its standard rock band template. "A Punchup at the Wedding" swaggers and glowers its barely restrained rage, and even "The Gloaming," with its lonely appeal for reason, manages to ride a spindrift froth of cascading beats and glitchy crackle above all the alarms and surprises before losing its nerve at the 11th hour.

This leaves closing song "A Wolf at the Door," in which most of the album's strands — the political, the personal, the parental — are loosely braided. From the first rich organ note, it feels claustrophobic, as if we're caught within a distorted fairy-tale illustration. When Yorke's voice enters, it does so in a muted vandals-took-the-handles rant, like a subterranean homesick alien engaging in some lonely tubthumping, daring to stream aloud the unconscious fears that keep him awake nights. There is fear for his child, fear for himself, fear for all the quietly desperate victims of the countless dehumanizing layers of bullshit that block our airways, fill our airwaves, clog our freeways. It's a violent and frankly hopeless song, ricocheting between both named and nameless terrors, unable to rest — as if the computer voice of "Fitter Happier" had an epiphany and realized how trapped and Stepfordian he's become. And just in case we missed the warnings in the opening song, this awful yet riveting ending comes full circle, with the dimwitted platitude that might well become humanity's epitaph one day — "someone else is gonna come and clean it up." Sure, and we'll all go to heaven in a little rowboat.

— David Antrobus (digitalis@shaw.ca)