Mmm-mmm, Hail to the Thief. You know what? I’ll always root for this Radiohead album, even if it’s the one that the band and resident producer Nigel Godrich agree could have been worked on a little bit more. They recorded the songs in two weeks, in free spirits in a sunny LA after the stressful Kid A/Amnesiac sessions. They didn’t want to bring up any more bad blood that came from tracklist arrangements and production choices, so they put some light touches on and put all of them out there on an almost hour-long record, the final one on their contract with EMI. There are some great songs on there. A couple I’ve written about already. A few more I will do in the future. Those great songs, I reckon, are some of the best in the group’s whole discography.

It’s been a ride and a half up to the point you get to the album’s penultimate track ‘Scatterbrain’, but when it starts you’re greeted with a very calming drum track and descending guitar line by Jonny Greenwood. It’s also a welcome change of pace, considering it comes after one of the more menacing, fuzzed out songs on the record in ‘Myxomatosis’. Yorke said this song is a very hard one to describe, but mentioned that it was influenced by his favourite type of weather and an incident where the roof of a next-door neighbor of his flew up into the sky in a Wizard of Oz type manner. The lyrics do bring up a lot of imagery concerned with that sort of scenery. What I think the track is mainly about, is wanting to find some peace of mind in a world that’s going mad. And in 2003, with the Iraq War and all of that great stuff happening, things were going crazy and off the deep end for a while.

Think it’s fair to say that Thom Yorke’s vocal is the real highlight of the entire thing. While Ed O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood’s guitars are twinkling away in the left and right channels, Yorke comes in with an earnest performance that reverberates into the distance. He’s really left out in the open here. But his voice will glitch out to add a little quirk to the very human aspect of it all. The track subtly builds as things progress. Greenwood comes in first on the guitar, O’Brien joins in at the start of the second verse. What I think is a Mellotron joins in for the second half of that verse, and then these parts drop out one-by-one at the song’s key change, where Yorke claims that there must be someplace out there where he isn’t in is head too much and can be in a state of content. The way the last guitar note trails off and the last rimshot echoes into silence leaves things a little unresolved, which I think works perfectly well, as that then leads into the final track and brings everything to a swift conclusion. But more about that song will be for another day.