I realize I'm a little late in the game on this, but I'd like to follow form and discuss at some length the album's initial pay-what-you-want online release before addressing with dismissive brevity the music, which is very good.
I paid $7.49 to download the album the night it became available. I picked this amount for two reasons. One: I wasn't sure if I was going to be charged US dollars or British pounds and given exchange rates this seemed like an equitable amount either way. And two: this is the number to which I default when browsing the used bins at records stores. I will often purchase discs of interest when priced $7.50 or less without much thought. Higher prices initiate an internal bargaining process which can lead to compromised decision making and larger moral dilemmas. What's interesting to me is that, like every other post I've read on the album's unconventional release, I feel obliged to tell you what I paid and why. From people justifying a free download to paying what they thought it was worth per song, the experiment seems to have forced a few folks to examine their place in the music for money game. Fancy that, Radiohead doing something that causes people to rethink things.
As for the music, Radiohead proves itself to be a real band made of real men capable of making real songs with regular instruments, and to be able to do it quite well. The roomfuls of sound generated by roomfuls of technical gadgets, complete with Thom Yorke's moving yet often inchoate vocal performances, seem to have been reinterpreted using traditional tools creating a soulful, stirring rock record, simple only by the standard set by the band's own work beginning with OK Computer. Not necessarily a return to early guitar driven work but a distillation of processes, returning focus to the band's performance rather than their innovations in the studio. The result is an album of hands-on music that sounds as if it was made by people rather than ideas. Based on the success of their online launch maybe Radiohead's most enduring innovation will be seen in the marketplace.
