So Radiohead has this new album out. The only catch is…uh you don’t have to pay for it. Now I know what your thinking, I’m encouraging rampant digital piracy and audio bootlegging. Not so, not so… you see Radiohead has generously decided to let you download the entire album In Rainbows in digital format, at whatever price you like. After years of grumbling about high album prices, it’s interesting to finally see someone in the music industry turn around and say “What do you think you should pay for an album?” Of course there’s always the temptation to say, well, nothing. Music should be free! You can’t quite actually do that here, as there is a processing fee that comes out to about $1 (the prices are actually done in British pounds — those cheeky Brits and their funny money), but still a pretty good deal compared to getting taken to the cleaners at a big-chain record store. I actually paid them about $6… I want their little experiment to succeed, so that more bands will give the idea a try.

And it is a good deal, because it’s a pretty good album. It delivers their usual blend of strangeness and alienation, beautifully layered instrumentation and digital effects, topped of by the unique sound of Thom Yorke’s fragile, wavery voice. For confirmed Radiohead fans it’s a must-have. But for those who know them only by the singles, Creep, Karma Police, etc. In Rainbows is a good opportunity to give the band a closer look. They’ve got some fresh stuff going on here too, a different feel. On several of the tracks, like “Faust Arp” and “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”, the songs actually sound, well, happy. Other tracks are hard to pin down one way or the other, making it a more subtle emotional landscape than their past stuff. Of course being Radiohead they close out the album with the darkest track of all, “Videotape”, which is some good, haunting stuff.

If you’d like to check out the album yourself, and you don’t mind laying down at least 0.45 pounds sterling, you can download it here:

http://www.inrainbows.com/

The site is a little difficult to use, I think they deliberately went for a retro, low-tech aesthetic. It looks like something built by a hacker circa about 1990.