Radiohead - In RainbowsI should write down some thoughts on Radiohead’s new label-free album release scheme. Not only is it an unprecedented move by a band of their popularity, but also I am contributing money to further this experiment. The Discbox set continues their tradition of limited edition packaging for their albums; see the elaborate limited-edition packaging for Kid A, Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief. While most of the art may seem excessive, it gives the releases a tactile quality that their web-savvy fans covet and actually go out and purchase.
I paid the $82.25 for the Discbox. Why would I do that, when I could have downloaded the whole album for literally nothing? Several reasons, the biggest being that I love Radiohead’s album artwork. As an admirer of well-executed album packaging, everything from The Bends onward has never disappointed. Sure I was a bit annoyed at first when Kid A sacrificed extensive liner notes for pages and pages of post-apocalyptic imagery. But it grew on me, and now I can’t image listening to that album and not have booklet before me, with its fold-out pages and tracing paper. In a later interview, Thom Yorke made a comment that gives the artwork for Kid A and Amnesiac a disturbing edge:
While explaining the decision to release two albums rather than one, singer Thom Yorke said, "They are separate because they cannot run in a straight line with each other. They cancel each other out as overall finished things... In some weird way, I think Amnesiac gives another take on Kid A, a form of explanation." He continued: "Something traumatic is happening in Kid A, and this is looking back at it, trying to piece together what has happened." About the differences with the previous record he says: "I think the artwork is the best way of explaining it. The artwork to Kid A was all in the distance. The fires were all going on the other side of the hill. With Amnesiac, you're actually in the forest while the fire's happening." Link
All this serves the point that proper album packaging can give off the air of an artifact, forever connected to the music on the disc it protects.
Radiohead are tight-lipped about most of the details on this new album, releasing only one promotional image of the 2xCD/2xLP set to the public. The whole thing will be in a hard-bound book, perhaps with a larger sleeve for it to fit in. The LPs appears to be housed in a sleeve with a V-cut on the side with a somber, grey distressed texture printed on it. There appears to be no packaging for the CDs, though that could be chalked up to: it being incomplete at the time of the photo shoot, it made the image of the packaging too busy, or they have some other idea in mind. Simple cardboard sleeves for each CD would make sense, tying them into the LP packaging and, again, saving on paper and plastic.
The track names on the back of the book or slipcase are set in the same justified paragraph style as Amnesiac, which annoyed me at first but has now grown on me as I associate it with the glitchy gaps in the music and general feeling on disconnectedness in the lyrics. The width of the text box looks like it was determined by the width that made “RADIOHEAD IN RAINBOWS” look properly kerned. The size kind of bothers me, mostly because I like having small groups of text against a grand blank canvas. The little box in the bottom left (aligned with the text box, thank God) looks like a minimized version of the “In/Rainbow” repeated text on the cover. This text treatment is repeated on the 2xCD labels, with black and white backgrounds. That strikes me as a little bit lazy upon first glance, and more than a little like R.E.M.’s similarly off-putting (though not necessarily in a bad way) text on the Automatic for the People CD.
The cover riffs on the linguistic game of hopscotch made when the title is literally chopped in front of our eyes. Though the pronunciation is the same, is any iteration of “IN/RAINBOWS”, “IN RAIN/BOWS” (etc) correct? The same chopping method seems to have been applied to the band name, though most of it is obscured. The text is laid out on top of some sort of black and orange image, perhaps an astronomical image (due to what appears to be a star field in the bottom right hand corner). The record sleeves look like monochromatic photos of peeling paint, distressed concrete, or some other similarly weathered surface.
Given that their previous artwork has focused on bold, layered designs, the somber simplicity is a markedly different approach for them. Nothing so far is as in-your-face as the confrontational covers of their last 4 albums, but perhaps they decided a change in pace was in order.
