I do feel a little shamed on being
beaten to the punch on Radiohead news and a little stupid for
paying for In Rainbows and supporting all you free-loaders (or free down-loaders, hardy har har)...
Although, I did receive an email from one of my professors in my graduate program who shed some light on the subject and made me feel there was some benefit to the In Rainbows experiment.
"Personally, I paid $0.00.
And I had never listened to Radiohead before..."
If a whole new group of people are now Radiohead fans I'm glad they did it...and Radiohead are smarter than all of us...but we knew that already didn't we?
Outside of this, it has been an interesting Radiohead week for me anyway...I've got about 10,000 songs on my mp3 player and I always have it on shuffle...I enjoying finding the connections between songs that you would never associate otherwise...While listening on Monday three songs in a row were Radiohead a pretty interesting statistical feat and two of the three were the same song, one being the album version and one being a live bootleg version.
The song was "A Punchup At A Wedding" from Hail to the Thief which has never been one of my favorites...maybe I just wasn't ready for it yet...The studio version came first and the then the live version followed and something sort of clicked for me...I think it might all be in Colin Greenwood's bass line of the live version which reminds me a little bit of the bass line on Interpol's "Public Pervert" [Side note: re-examine that song if you can...and adjust your stereo to high bass and lower the volume of everything else if possible...outstanding]...
The song took a new life for me...plus I had forgotten that for Hail to the Thief Radiohead gave each song essentially a 2nd title...for "A Punchup At A Wedding" the bonus title is "No No No No No No No No" and I can just hear the bride saying it...maybe getting louder with each successive "No."
Two days later, by coincidence, a classmate told me a story about how a fight had nearly broken out at her wedding between members of her family...I can hear her saying "No No No No No No No No."
Okay, download
In Rainbows for free you bastards
here...or buy all of Radiohead's Capitol/EMI records in one set
here.
The Bell are one of those bands that sometimes unfairly gets compared to a newish band named after an International police agency who sort of sound a little like a band that would eventually become New Order after their lead singer committed suicide [allegedly]. I don't feel like mentioning them here as it sometimes pigeonholes the music. 
