The Best Of by Radiohead
Radiohead: The Best Of is a compilation album of English alternative rock band Radiohead. The album features singles, album tracks and one B-side the band released from 1992 to 2003 while with EMI. The first disc, also available separately, comprises the majority of the band's charting hits, while the second disc concentrates on less commercially successful singles and other tracks. All of the material on both discs had been previously released. The sleevenotes for the compilation were written by British music journalist Chris Salmon. As a parallel release, a DVD compilation featured 21 music videos, of which nine were released on DVD for the first time. The compilation debuted at number 4 in the UK album charts, and critical reception to the compilation was generally positive. This is the first released compilation of Radiohead's songs, but it had not been sanctioned by the band; it was prepared by EMI after the band's departure, and Radiohead band members did not participate in selecting the tracks. Nevertheless, according to interviews the band had major input through their career in the choice of most of their singles that were later included on the compilation. A few non-singles which remain regulars in the band's live sets were also included, such as "Idioteque" and "Everything in Its Right Place" from Kid A, their only album until The King of Limbs without singles. Members of the band have expressed their disapproval of the compilation due to its hodgepodge track sequencing; the band once stated in an interview in 2003 that they would never release a greatest hits collection. Radiohead: The Best Of was prepared soon after they decided not to renew their contract with the label. In 2008 singer Thom Yorke said, "We haven’t really had any hits so what exactly is the purpose? There’s nothing we can do about it. The work is really public property now anyway... It’s a wasted opportunity in that if we’d been behind it, and we wanted to do it, then it might have been good". The compilation contains only songs to which EMI holds the publishing rights; all of the tracks were recorded before Radiohead's seventh studio album, In Rainbows (2007), as the band ended their contract with EMI in 2004 and signed with other labels for future distribution.
As Thom Yorke sat down to type out the lyrics to “A Wolf at the Door”—the near-rap that ends Radiohead’s sixth album, <i>Hail to the Thief</i>—for artist Stanley Donwood, the singer was stunned by the cumulative violence of the images: knives in necks, Stepford wives and clandestine mistresses, dead people dragged through windows. But all that danger and anger was in the air as Radiohead plotted and recorded this dark 2003 effort, its title a reference to George W. Bush’s electoral hijinks, and its songs written and recorded as the United States began its post-9/11 assaults. And on <i>Hail to the Thief</i>, the angst of that era is everywhere: There’s the Orwellian logic of “2 + 2 = 5”, the nuclear fallout of “I Will” and the plagued race of “Myxomatosis”, named for an especially fatal rabbit pox. Perhaps it was the cumulative effect of early-2000s despair that had inspired Yorke’s bleak lyrics? “Rather than waking you up and it’s like, ‘Uhh, it’s all been a lovely dream,’” the singer later confirmed, “it’s all been a nightmare, and you need to go and get a glass of water now.” Following the creative successes of <i>Kid A</i> and <i>Amnesiac</i>—which found the members of Radiohead rethinking their approach to the studio—the group once again shook things up on <i>Hail to the Thief</i>. In 2002, Yorke and his bandmates decamped to the famed Ocean Way in Los Angeles for two weeks, recording a song every day. For the first time in years, they had real fun, indulging not only in the sunshine outside but in the studio’s big room, where they worked as a cohesive quintet. While still testing out equipment, the group laid down the track that would become “2 + 2 = 5”—and the song’s incisive riff, falsetto vocals and rhythmic tricks set the stage for <i>Hail to the Thief</i>’s scope. This is an album that finds Radiohead approaching familiar rock territory, from the momentous strum-and-drum anthem “Go to Sleep” to the chiming notes of “Scatterbrain”. But witness the tape-splice wizardry and big beat of “The Gloaming”, or the whirring circuits and clipped rhythms of “Backdrifts”: This is a band that, having ventured far beyond recognisable comforts after <i>OK Computer</i>, was now moving deliberately and defiantly toward the center—at least for a spell. There’s no Radiohead record more vitriolic, nor more emotionally persuasive, than <i>Hail to the Thief</i>—which is fitting, given that it was birthed in a political climate that felt poised to end the world. The dystopian nightmares Radiohead had voiced on every record from the start were coming true—and an ending Yorke had long predicted now seemed to be in bloom. “We are not the same as you,” he sings during “The Gloaming”, drawing a line between those defending the world and those destroying it. With big drums and damning language, strangling solos and corroded electronics, <i>Hail to the Thief</i> is Radiohead’s fight music.
