I finally got around to purchasing Radiohead’s new album In Rainbows (for the curious, I chose to pay 5£ for it). I’ve been listening to it fairly consistently over the past week, and I’m thinking that this is quite possibly my favourite Radiohead album to date. The first song that really struck out at me was Reckoner:

Reckoner
You can’t take it with you
Disavow the pleasure

You were not to blame for
Bittersweet distractors
Dare not speak his name
Dedicated to all you
All your needs?

Because we separate
it ripples our reflections
(in rainbows)
Because we separate
it ripples our reflections
(in rainbows)

Reckoner

Dedicated to all you
All your needs?

The off-kilter drums and haunting guitar combine in a soothing, enveloping sound. This is the kind of music I find that I am quite literally able to lose myself in. I worked out the basic chord progression for those that are interested:

C Em D C Em

Obviously there’s a lot more to the song than that (in fact they aren’t even playing these chords, they are playing pairs of notes that work their way up and down the fretboard), but I’ve never been one to care much for how someone plays their song, I want to be able to play it to suit myself. Just playing the simple chords on my 12-string acoustic sounds pretty good, and when my fingers stop bleeding I can throw in some trickery with the notes and it will all end up sounding quite convincing!

Unfortunately, every silver lining has a cloud, and In Rainbows is no exception. The album was distributed as an archive of mp3s with a bitrate of 160 Kbps. When I’m ripping music for my iPod, I use at least 240 Kbps, and if I’m ripping music for permanent keeping on my computer, I’ve started using FLAC, which is a free lossless audio codec (meaning that FLAC’s compression is purely binary-driven as opposed to contextual like mp3; FLACs are identical audio copies of the source file but with reduced size).

When I first saw the size of the download (which you don’t find out until after you’ve payed), I was pretty disappointed. While this has been countered by my enjoyment of the album over the past week, I am definitely left wishing they had made available a higher-quality download. Perhaps they opted for this route to reduce bandwidth in the initial surge? Perhaps, once the deluge of people downloading the album has subsided, they will choose to grace us with a higher-bitrate (or even FLAC) version of the album for those that consider themselves to have audiophilic tendencies.

Here’s hoping anyway =/