I’ve been listening to the new Radiohead CD, Hail to the Thief over the past week. It’s a bit downbeat, but that’s to be expected, and it continues to move forward by striking a balance between pop and experimental elements. There are two songs on the CD that I love: the first single, “There there” and “Punchup at a Wedding.” The two songs seem to be some of the less processed, and more built around the band playing (who knows if that’s how the tracks came about, but that’s how I think about it). The video for “There, There” is an amazing stop-motion animation with Thom wandering through forest filled with anthropomorphic animals. The video is at the “Radiohead Television” site, and if you check out the site at the top of the hour you can see a half-hour show, “The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time” which features music from the CD combined with more experimental video and animation as well as some live stuff. It’s a neat progression from the videoblips used to market “Kid A” in a more viral sense. I’ve only seen one episode, but I liked it. One quirky thing that I’ve noticed is that it looks as if the site isn’t working when I access it with Safari, but that was because the pop-up blocking feature was stopping it from happening… so you have to allow unrequested pop-ups for that site to see the show (just make sure you turn it back on after you leave the site). The band is doing the rounds like every other band now as it seems they’ve become much more well-adjusted as human beings following the grind of “OK Computer” documented by Grant Gee in “Meeting People is Easy“.