THE GOOD: By now, you can probably recite which albums landed in the top 10 without even taking a peek at the list beforehand.
THE BAD: By now, you can probably recite which albums landed in the top 10 without even taking a peek at the list beforehand.
THE WHAAAA? The Klaxons were the 10th-most-blogged-about band, but Myths Of The Near Future limped in at No. 46, just behind Stars' In Our Bedroom After The War and right in front of Rilo Kiley's How You Like My Micromini Now?

Albums
1. Radiohead, In Rainbows
2. Arcade Fire, Neon Bible
3. The National, Boxer
4. LCD Soundsystem, Sound Of Silver
5. Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
6. M.I.A. Kala
7. Panda Bear, Person Pitch
8. Feist, The Reminder
9. Of Montreal, Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
10. Okkervil River, The Stage Names

Bands
1. Arcade Fire
2. Radiohead
3. Feist
4. LCD Soundsystem
5. Spoon
6. Justice
7. The National
8. Of Montreal
9. Wilco
10. Klaxons

THE GOOD: Consensus cynicism be damned, it's kind of heartening that, after all the first-listen reviews and release date hype hype, people actually do seem to be repeat-listening to and enjoying the Most Important Album Of 2007. (You can decide which one we're talking about.)
THE BAD: That said, consensus keeps great records from Roisin Murphy, Dude N' Nem, and the Dirty Projectors, which "most often received first-place votes," off the singles list in favor of two Arcade Fire joints, two Radiohead songs, and (less irritatingly) two Spoon and LCD Soundsystem tracks each. Democracy!
THE WHAAA?: We've only included the Best Albums and Best Singles list after the jump, but interestingly, or perhaps just keeping with this year's vibe of established artists comfortably trouncing even well-regarded upstarts, only three of the winners in the Best New(ish) Act category make the album and/or singles lists, all down in the lower reaches save the expected Top 10 finish for Justice's "D.A.N.C.E."

Albums
1. Radiohead: In Rainbows
2. LCD Soundsystem: Sound of Silver
3. Panda Bear: Person Pitch
4. The National: Boxer
5. Animal Collective: Strawberry Jam
6. Arcade Fire: Neon Bible
7. Spoon: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Of Montreal: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
9. M.I.A.: Kala
10. Battles: Mirrored
11. Feist: The Reminder
12. Okkervil River: The Stage Names
13. Jens Lekman: Night Falls Over Kortedala
14. Sunset Rubdown: Random Spirit Lover
15. Wilco: Sky Blue Sky
16. Menomena: Friend and Foe
17. Justice: †
18. Burial: Untrue
19. Deerhunter: Cryptograms
20. Iron & Wine: The Shepherd's Dog
21. The Field: From Here We Go Sublime
22. Andrew Bird: Armchair Apocrypha
22. Kanye West: Graduation
23. Modest Mouse: We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
24. The Shins: Wincing the Night Away
25. Band of Horses: Cease to Begin

Singles
1. LCD Soundsystem: "All My Friends"
2. Panda Bear: "Bros"
3. M.I.A.: "Paper Planes"
4. Battles: "Atlas"
5. Animal Collective: "Fireworks"
6. LCD Soundsystem: "Someone Great"
7. The National: "Mistaken for Strangers"
8. Feist: "1 2 3 4"
9. Justice: "D.A.N.C.E."
10. Arcade Fire: "Keep the Car Running"
11. Radiohead: "Jigsaw Falling Into Place"
12. Radiohead: "Nude"
13. Arcade Fire: "Intervention"
14. Spoon: "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb"
15. Of Montreal: "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse"
16. Spoon: "The Underdog"
17. Okkervil River: "Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe"
18. Animal Collective: "Peacebone"
19. Beirut: "Elephant Gun"
20. UGK [ft. Outkast]: "Int'l Players Anthem (I Choose You)"
21. Rihanna: "Umbrella"
22. Wilco: "Impossible Germany"
23. Jens Lekman: "A Postcard to Nina"
24. Caribou: "Melody Day"
25. Band of Horses: "Is There a Ghost?"

2007 Pitchfork Readers Poll [Pitchfork]

In Rainbows [iTunes]
In Rainbows [Amazon]

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

Uncertain Prospects for Radiohead CD [NYT]

for your information>>>


we did not ask for a load of cash from our old record label EMI to re- sign.
that is a L I E.
The Times in the UK should check its facts before it prints such dirt.

whAT we WANTED WAS some control over OUR WOrK and how it was used in the future by them- that seemed REASONAblE to us,
as we cared about it a great deal.

Mr Hands was not interested.
So neither were we.

We made the sign of the cross and walked away. Sadly.

We are extremely upset that this crap is being spread about.

To bedigging up such bullshit, or more politely airing yer dirty laundry in public, seems a very strange way for the head of an international record label to be proceeding.

On a happier note we took no 'BRead-HEAd' advances at all from both independent labels XL and TBD for our new record.

So judge for yourself.

AND we are really excited to be working with them. SHock!

AT least they do not behave like confused bulls in a china shop.

much love

thom
x

So there you go. Also: Did a British tabloid really use the appellation "Bread-head" in a headline? Because that makes me feel a little less guilty about all the lame-ass puns I've used over the past year and a half.

F Y I_____ if you care [dead air space]
Earlier: EMI: Radiohead Demanded £10 Million Payday At The End Of Its Rainbow

Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood has more in common with Radiohead's In Rainbows than merely the presence of guitarist Jonny Greenwood as the film's soundtrack composer. Both were long-incubated pieces released in 2007, but Radiohead's album and Anderson's Upton Sinclair-based period piece are far more underwhelming than the laborious work and surrounding press would lead you to believe. Thinkpieces about the former all but killing the record industry conveniently leave out the fact that the band's worldwide platform was built by EMI/Parlophone, and from auditioning the low-fidelity digital files that made up the first release of the album, one wonders why a band uploading its glorified demos onto the Internet was such a big deal at the end of the day.

Between Blood, The Darjeeling Limited, and No Country For Old Men, 2007 was filled with detail-obsessive American moviemakers emphasizing parables set in non-arable, inhospitable land, detailing worlds decidedly masculine and wholly bereft of femininity. The trend no doubt reaches a head in Anderson's Blood, a story about lone-wolf prospector Daniel Plainview, who graduates from chiseling out silver to tapping into reservoirs of crude oil. From previews alone, the story looks to be a harrowing one, a long-simmering, accusatory movie about how Christianity and capitalism collude and collide. Alas, running at nearly three hours, it fizzles just when it should combust.

That's not exactly Greenwood's fault, as the guitarist's neo-classical turn here is surprisingly strong. Composer-in-residence for the BBC Orchestra (no doubt bringing in an audience of green hairs to mix with the blue hairs), Greenwood deploys orchestral music judiciously throughout. In the voiceless opening sequences, Greenwood uses a range of string timbres, sharpening them into piercing, vertiginous drones. While Arvo Part is no doubt a touchstone for the young composer, the soundtrack here is not unlike Toru Takemitsu's soundtrack for Woman of the Dunes in that out of the massed strings, Greenwood teases out disembodied choruses and ethereal tones. It mirrors how Plainview gleans oil out of the ground like a straw in a milkshake (an image that comes back during a spittle-flecked monologue at movie's end).

Come the second act of the film, suddenly the sonic palette widens, with Greenwood deploying piano trios and introducing more melodic elements, the themes especially poignant as the relationships between Plainview and his family members—his surrogate son H.W. and his estranged brother—are explored. Still, though, a dread lurks beneath the surface. As the conflict between church and business intensifies, the derrick suspiciously like the similarly-erected church steeple, so too does the bass section of the orchestra pit grow more anxious in its motifs. And when oil is finally struck, only to burst into a towering inferno, an intense battery of percussion thunders for minutes on end (perhaps another homage to Takemitsu?).

As the movie passes the 120-minute mark, it becomes apparent that the long-anticipated showdown between the oil magnate and the Church of the Third Revelation (fact check) will never quite come to a head. Instead, we get to watch as Plainview's curmudgeonly, heart-blackened ways crystallize for another fifty minutes, the long-building intensity ebbing away. Greenwood's music too slowly recedes into the arid backdrop, drying up like an oil well.

The massive demand is far greater than had been thought. The critically acclaimed band had been offered a £3 million advance by Mr Hands for their latest album, but wanted more.

An EMI spokesman said last night: "Radiohead were demanding an extraordinary amount of money and we did not believe that our other artists should have to subsidise their gains."

The band's management hit back, saying that it believed that more high-profile artists could abandon EMI. It accused Mr Hands of not negotiating seriously.


Radiohead wanted EMI to hand over at least some of the copyrights to their catalogue of albums such as OK Computer, a demand that would have devalued EMI's recorded music catalogue and cost the British music major millions in future earnings.

Giving Radiohead the rights to their last two albums would have presented EMI with a £4 million loss. It is believed that the band was also seeking a guaranteed £3 million EMI budget on international marketing for the new album, although their management does not accept this figure.

Well, of course they're going to dispute those claims—didn't the "international marketing" for In Rainbows wind up being pretty low-cost? Some wheatpasted posters here, some T-shirts there, some low-cost video ads that got picked up by bloggers far and wide. Oh yeah, and all that free publicity garnered by the "pay what you like we're smashing the record industry, hahaha just kidding please buy the discbox or the plain old CD, kthxbye!" stunt. That didn't really cost much, though, right? I mean, the way that first webcast kept crapping out, you'd think that they went really really deep discount on their Webhosting plan.

EMI accuses Radiohead after group's demands for more fell on deaf ears [Times Online]

Hello,

Just to let you know...

Your "In Rainbows" discbox has now left w.a.s.t.e. in the UK

You can expect delivery of your discbox in the following estimated times.

UK 1-8 days

Europe 1-14 days

Rest of World 5-18 days

Wherever possible (especially to customers in the USA), we've sent these by road and sea.

December is a busy time of year for postal services globally, so please be patient.

We thank you for your custom and hope you enjoy your discbox when you receive it.

Best wishes.
us @ w.a.s.t.e.

"By road and sea" sounds so quaint, doesn't it? Anyway, given that I moved house between the time of my ordering the discbox and it actually being shipped, I suspect that mine will arrive sometime around the plain old CD's physical release date. If it shows up at all!

R A D I O H E A D [inrainbows.com]

Well, it's bloody time we let the cat out of the bag. You've all acted like right wankers and entertained us long enough. The rumors you have heard are true ... I am responsible for this site.

It was a laugh. We're having a time recording the new album.

I'm writing deep songs that mean something but are dead simple. Nothing mystic. I want anybody to be able to understand them, even me.

You're all going to drive yourselves mad.

We have our 'discbox' and we're not going to share.

your favourite,

liam gallagher

'Course the likelihood of this silliness being true is nil. Sad, because no matter how much the Gallaghers may annoy, pranking Radiohead fanboys and girls is a noble way to spend your coked-up free time. But let us not rule out the profane philistine entirely. A (very cursory) Whois search reveals that the site is still privately registered, meaning it could be the work of Liam Gallagher or Noel Gallagher or maybe the Gallagher with the watermelons. Actually, we would have guessed that Gallagher way before either of the Oasis brothers.

radioheadlp7.com ["Official Site" via Gigwise]

Before you go venturing to the Pirate Bay or What.cd to download the second disc, don't bother. w.a.s.t.e., Radiohead's own merchandiser, has already contacted Spuff and requested that he (or she) not upload the second disc, forcing a board full of bemoaning AtEasers to wait another week for their own discbox. w.a.s.t.e. also asked Spuff "for the order details so that the dispatch company could be bollocked!" So that's how the Brits use "bollocked," interesting. Even though Spuff has stated he will respect and honor w.a.s.t.e.'s request to not share the second disc with others, he did offer a consolation to the message board crew in the form of pictures of the discbox and a description of some of the bonus disc's tracks.

And now people still have to wait a whole seven days before they can steal everything on the discbox that isn't made of paper or petroleum? Boooo. On the other hand, what are the odds this postal cock up would send the errant discbox to the one honest person left on the Internet?

Radiohead Fan Accidentally Gets In Rainbows Discbox One Week Early [Rolling Stone]

as for radiohead= they didcnt jump off a REAL clifff, they bungee jumped you KNOW the kamikaze pilot in me wnats to do the same dfamm thing excapt wuith my a lsit mnaterial, with the real thing- theyve made 9.7 m,illion in 3 weeks this way and its live junk-= not junk as radioheaddoesnt really amke JUNK but its live - most of it heard before( wich youve all heard liveversaionbs of things veryvery different than non live versions of things) i really think it couldf work do all my magazine covers in january - so the lead time in there kamikaze thropugh my junket my oprah my tv shit n the 2 week leaD UP and just jump of f that cliff i love doing things really first im greatful for radiohead for making the first move- id do it differentlyt -= thats why b sides are no longer b sisdes but have to be a sides to an extent-= cos theyre EXTRA TRACKS now wich can mean up to 500k to such and such sponsor coty./my space etc. ... i justthinjk offering about 10 songs but your best for "free" witha what am i worth sign not just NINs cast offs i mean yopur a sides- i don t know im percolating- i love risk and most everything ive ever done well has been because everyone said iw as crazy to do it-= thazts why words liek "risk management" and Rime management:" are4 resonating with me now.

Not that I know what "rime management" is, but hey, I'd kick Courtney some money for a self-financed album. Especially now that she's trying to fashion herself as the Suze Orman of the rocker-chick set, as evidenced by the title of the post where she floats her Radiohead idea:

Fica/Radiohead [Courtney Love's MySpace Blog]

EMI's publicist referred to the ad as a "service glitch," but I like to think of the above ad as "an attempt to dupe casual fans who haven't been paying attention to the Internet for the past month, and are therefore unclear on the title of the new album." I mean, "Rainbow" isn't even pluralized!

EMI Removes Radiohead 'Rainbow' Ad [Guardian]

Warner Bros Records senior technology director Ethan Kaplan quickly savaged comScore's methodology, which included only a "few hundred" in the study. Yesterday, Radiohead issued their own statement calling the figures "purely speculative": "As the album could only be downloaded from the band's website, it is impossible for outside organisations to have accurate figures on sales. The figures quoted by the company comScore Inc are wholly inaccurate and in no way reflect definitive market intelligence or, indeed, the true success of the project."

Then last night comScore marketing manager and analyst Andrew Lipsman posted a lengthy blog entry in defence, stating the agency uses "a representative sample of two million internet users", which he said this time was "nearly one thousand" (though that later became "hundreds"): "When we observe an e-commerce transaction in our panel, the value we observe represents the actual price paid by that consumer ... If we didn't have a reasonable sample from which to extrapolate, we wouldn't have released the data. But we did, and we're confident in what the data showed."

Well, there's that rainbow-colored grain of salt we were talking about: Only a few hundred people polled out of the apparently 1.2 million people who "visited" (with or without downloading) the In Rainbows site, to use ComScore's own initial estimate. Will we ever know how much paper Thom and friends stacked up thanks to its greatest media coupmost altruistic gesture? Or would hard numbers spoil the sense of do-gooderism?

ComScore Vs Radiohead: Are Download Stats A Creep, A Weirdo? [paidContent UK]

Since New Year's Eve falls on a Monday, and albums usually come out over here on Tuesdays, it would follow that In Rainbows would get a domestic release on Jan. 1, 2008—thus allowing the album to dominate the music-related discourse (and "best-of" lists for the true diehards) for a second calendar year. Honestly, do these guys know how to run a marketing campaign or what?

New Radiohead Album Due Dec. 31 On CD [Billboard]

ComScore, "a leader in measuring the digital world," has apparently kept an eye on just who was paying for In Rainbows and how much they were forking over. The answer? As little as could be squeezed out:

During the first 29 days of October, 1.2 million people worldwide visited the "In Rainbows" site, with a significant percentage of visitors ultimately downloading the album. The study showed that 38 percent of global downloaders of the album willingly paid to do so, with the remaining 62 percent choosing to pay nothing. The percent downloading for free in the U.S. (60 percent) is only marginally lower than in the rest of the world (64 percent).

Everyone who foresaw this development can now give themselves a gold star. Of course, no one has obtained any firm numbers directly from the band or its management just yet—a rainbow-colored grain of salt for the time being—but even if this data pans out and Radiohead's point has been somewhat undermined by their "freeloading" fans, as ComScore's Gian Fulgoni told the Chicago Tribune:

He noted that an e-commerce Web site typically converts about 5 percent of its traffic into sales in a given month. The conversion rate for the Radiohead album will be "substantially higher," he said. "You can see this getting up into the millions of dollars."

See, not a total failure. Champagne for everyone, then.

For Radiohead Fans, Does "Free" + "Download" = "Freeload"? [ComScore]

To compare, the No. 11 song, "Stronger" by Kanye West, garnered 49,293 plays from 20,402 listeners in that time period. Vampire Weekend and Black Kids—this is what you, as new Internet darlings, have to measure up to! Can you handle it?

Top Track Charts [last.fm]
"In Rainbows" Tops Virtual Charts [Ateaseweb, via RS]

A poll of in excess of 3,000 people on a Record of the Day website has found that the average price a Radiohead fan paid for a copy of 'In Rainbows' was £4.

Corroborated with our exclusive that the Oxford band shifted 1.2million copies of the album - thanks to inside knowledge of a source close to the band - it means that Radiohead could have potentially earned a massive £4.8million from the album already!

Not that we shouldn't trust an informal poll multipled by "exclusive" uncorroborated sales figures, but if the actual number comes out to be £4.8 million (or more) before the physical copies even hit the stores, I guess a "mazel tov" is in order?

Radiohead Net 4.8 Million Pounds For "In Rainbows" [Gigwise]

it's 3:00 am, nearly 3:03 am which makes it nearly 12 hours away from it some sort of aniversary of my birth. I'm drunk on fermented grape, and willing to speak my thoughts of the new radiohead album as I listen to it. So far it is as I expected boredering on rythem and anit-rythem, brilliance, their regerated past, motown, electronica, nick cave, isolation, longing, and perhaps their best album .better than yorks solo album, much, much better. I believe it will go down in the next week or so as ground breaking, doomed to fall into obsurity thorough the passing of time but it effects on the music industry will far outlast the albums impact to the single fan/ listener. This will be due to radiohead's MSRP, which is as far as I can tell is 1 english pound, I paid 5. I am not a fool , I paid 5 pounds because that is what I would have paid elsewhere for it in the first week of it's release. I asked myself if i deluged myself by paying 10 u.s. dollors for something that I could either 1) illegaly downloaded or 2) pay 1 pound roughly 2 dollors u.s. for. I paid 10 dollors for something that took a very long time to produce ,4 years in fact. but had no overhead, no layout, no record contract, no jewel case to loose, no weird drawings, no acid free paper, no acid laden paper, no real price tag. I feel the beauty of this album will be felt by fans, and the few that discover this album as their first radiohead experiance. However the true devotees will be all those bands that follow in the future with similar styled releases , that we will all see as the normal purchasing process in the future. God speed mr. greenwood thanks for the nice album it was worth 10 bucks.

P.S. they will totally kick kid rocks ass but they wont appear on billboard's top 100. thats fuckin awsome.

If nothing else, it would have made for a much better quote for the AP than what they ended up choosing.

JChassey [Idolator]

Rob Sheffield's review does have some of that wide-eyed, uncritical, "slightly wordier NME fan" quality that I worried about: "None of it sounds like any other band on earth." (Really? Because I can hear a lot of intentional or unintentional references to other bands. Including the friggin' Eagles.) But the review is actually fairly considered for having to bear the weight of being the Official Rolling Stone Pronouncement Written In Just One Day. Because what really stood out was the rating: Four and a half stars? After less than 24 hours to digest the album? We all agree that numerical and star ratings are bunk—trust me, I know—and that Rolling Stone's are famously sillier than most and that it's hardly like this is some blog-hype band that RS has graced with an almost-perfect rating. But still, Radiohead's biggest coup might be getting the staid, canon-obsessed Stone to gush over pop culture (at least by a band that formed within the last 20 years) with the instant-hit ephemerality of your average, well, blog. And better luck next time, Radiohead. You'll kick Mick's ass yet.

Rolling Stone Review: Radiohead's "In Rainbows" [Rolling Stone]

Radiohead's much-debated decision to let fans choose what they pay for its new album online is a promotional tactic to boost sales of compact discs, the band's management said yesterday.

"If we didn't believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD, then we wouldn't do what we are doing," Bryce Edge of Courtyard Management told Music Week, the UK's industry magazine.

The decision to release In Rainbows online and to allow buyers to pay as little as they like has been lauded by some analysts as a ground-breaking model for an industry struggling to compete with free illegal downloads.

As many as half of those who registered for the download had paid more than the minimum 45p transaction fee, Mr Edge indicated, but he described the initiative as "a solution for Radiohead, not the industry", and defended the superior quality of CD recordings.

"Too cheaply"! Tell that to the poor suckers who shelled out $205 for a bunch of low-quality sound files. Anyway, this can only mean one thing: the Google Blog Search results for "in rainbows" + ripoff will be skyrocketing faster than you can say "self-righteous Internet anger."

Radiohead MP3 release a tactic to lift CD sales [FT]

"in rainbows" + fantastic: 58 results.
"in rainbows" + awesome: 53 results.
"in rainbows" + bitrate: 31 results.
"in rainbows" + oink: 17 results.
"in rainbows" + incredible: 16 results.
"in rainbows" + sucks: 15 results.
"in rainbows" + omg: 12 results.
"in rainbows" + "holy shit": 9 results.
"in rainbows" + lol: 5 results.
"in rainbows" + outstanding: 5 results.
"in rainbows" + "album of the year": 5 results (and a lot of eye-rolling).
"in rainbows" + embarrassing: 3 results.
"in rainbows" + "i cried": 2 results.
"i love in rainbows": 0 results.
"i love thom yorke": 0 results.

Aww, there, there, Thom. We're sure no one has professed their love for you yet because people are still at work.

Google Blog Search [blogsearch.google.com]

• "They've made entertainment history, unless they haven't, as if that was their role all along, as if they set themselves up as epic melancholy pop radicals with pseudo majestic conceptual breadth just so that they could be the ones that finally finished off the dinausaurian 20th Century music industry. So that the rock music business doesn't end with a bang but with a well calibrated well intentioned sloganeering Radiohead whimper. Four stars. And a couple of complaints. And a hint of middle brow madness. And a note of dismay about the forty quid." [Observer]
• "Overall, well worth the four bucks I paid for it — with is twice what the band would have made from a physical copy sold through a label. Color us pleased androids." [Donewaiting]
• "For what it's worth, In Rainbows was sent to me at 6.30am. Three hours later, this insidious index of sonic surprises is stacking up in my mind, like planes waiting to land. The trick, I guess, is to give your fans what they didn't know they wanted. Radiohead, old hands at this, have been doing it for over a decade now. With In Rainbows, they appear to have done it again." [Times Online]
• "I want to listen again — more important, I'm intrigued. It doesn't leave me cold; it didn't stab me in the heart the way Band of Horses just did. But there's a quiet, understated beauty to it that's welcoming and makes me want to explore more." [Riverfront Times]
• "Early buzz says In Rainbows is ... well, actually you're gonna help dictate that early buzz right now. " [Stereogum]

Having already asked fearless Idolator intern Kate Richardson to travel into the depths of both online emo slash fiction communities and the Virtual VMAs, we sent her into the real world for a change, as she and videographer Alex Goldberg polled New Yorkers as to, well, whether they were buying the Radiohead record, how much they would pay, whether they would also snag the CD whenever it drops, and what they think this bodes for the future of the music industry.

THANK YOU FOR ORDERING IN RAINBOWS. THIS IS AN UPDATE.

YOUR UNIQUE ACTIVATION CODE(S) WILL BE SENT OUT TOMORROW MORNING (UK TIME). THIS WILL TAKE YOU STRAIGHT TO THE DOWNLOAD AREA.

HERE IS SOME INFORMATION ABOUT THE DOWNLOAD:

THE ALBUM WILL COME AS A 48.4MB ZIP FILE CONTAINING 10 X 160KBPS DRM FREE MP3s.

MOST COMPUTERS NOW HAVE ZIP SOFTWARE AS PART OF THE OPERATING SYSTEM; IF YOUR COMPUTER DOES NOT, YOU NEED TO GET WINZIP OR ZIPIT INSTALLED PRIOR.

YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THEM HERE:

PC: http://www.winzip.com/
MAC: http://www.maczipit.com/

IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS OR PROBLEMS DOWNLOADING YOUR FILE, PLEASE CONTACT OUR DOWNLOAD CUSTOMER SERVICE TEAM AT downloadinrainbows@waste.uk.com

160KBps is a far cry from the 320KBps-encoded offerings that Radiohead's released up to this point, so I'm guessing the proprietor of Kids Pushing Kids elected to go the "free download" route, as the site's proprietor asks, "Wait, am I getting what I paid for? I hate getting what I paid for." And the folks on Radiohead's message board aren't too happy, either (sample comment: "That's a bit crap, isn't it?"). But I'm not that surprised—again, this whole digital-release run-up is seeming like the most well-orchestrated press campaign ever, although I'm wondering if this news is going to inspire more blowback than it does sales of the discbox.

160 KBPS In Rainbows tracks? Radiohead? What is this, 1996? Or: wait, am I getting what I paid for? I hate getting what I paid for. [Kids Pushing Kids]

My review below, it was more difficult than I thought, although I've heard rough mixes, it was difficult to get a feel for the album, as it's not mixed together, well I'll have a better idea on 10th October, anyway enjoy.

'Good things, come to those who wait' that's what my mum said to me as a child and it's so true upon hearing Radiohead's long-awaited new LP 'In Rainbows.'

'In Rainbows' is similar to 'Hail to the Thief' in its conception of mixing styles and sounds developed during the recording of The Bends, Ok Computer, and Kid A/Amnesiac. From the opening bars of the 'Idiotequesque' '15 Step' to the final bars of the majestic 'Videotape', there is a vast array of genres and styles to feast upon.

Although Thom's lyrics seem to be from the Coldplay school of writing, the simplicity of song such as 'All I Need' a piano ballad building to an emphatic crescendo and the long awaited release of the swing-jazz influenced 'Nude' left over from Ok Computer make up for them.

'In Rainbows' is available to download from Radiohead.com from 10th October for as little or as much as you want to pay for it.

And then the writer goes on to say that "Videotape"—one of the four songs said writer's apparently heard—is the pick of the litter. (Hear that, bloggers who are no doubt already sharpening your e-pencils?) I'd say more about this review, and how I can't even tell if it's taking the piss on bloggers and the culture of "First!" because it's written in a sub-message-board style, but my eye is stuck on the word "Idiotequesque," which looks like a 10-car pileup on the highest-scoring Scrabble board of all time.

Album Review: Radiohead - In Rainbows [Student Direct; HT ig1234]

^* If you see another, though, feel free to point it out in comments.