200 words about Hail To The Thief

I saw Ted Leo this March touring the 20th anniversary of Shake The Sheets. He rejected its reputation as his “political” album — he’d intended it, he told the crowd, not as some grand statement a la American Idiot but rather to be played in rooms of likeminded people, planning and executing direct action. I thought of this distinction listening to Thom Yorke’s recent excavation of Hail To The Thief — one of my bottom two Radiohead records — and the furious, nervy energy the songs radiate in the new live recordings. Yorke loses his composure, yelps like he’s drowning; Selway, cooking so hard the band would soon need a second drummer, slams a swing beat into “Wolf At The Door”; Greenwoods turn Godrich sounds into god-tier guitars. For an album that begins with the sound of an amp plugging in, HTTT never felt particularly electric, but it does here, its simple feedback recalling an older and more sacred interplay between melody and machine. It demands amplification, crowds, space. A few snips to the tracklist, though, is a half-measure. Resequence per Yorke’s 2008 recipe to create something relentless and catastrophic — a bona fide lost masterpiece.