"SELF-RELEASED", like an alien?

"I love pop music to death..... Most great composers rely on folk music. I rely on pop music. I'm not saying I'm a great composer or that pop music is folk music. There's a whole endless thing going on out there. You make your little pond but if your pond isn't connected to the river, which isn't connected to an ocean, it's just going to dry up. It's just a little piss pool. I've lived too long to be happy in a pond."

Robert Wyatt

"Always the innovators, Radiohead has done it again. This time, however, it's not so much the music that is challenging conventions -- it's the groundbreaking system of delivering the music. "In Rainbows" is not available through any retailer or online store; the seventh studio album from the English art-rock band is only available via a download from its Web site (radiohead.com.) And the digital album is priced pay-what-you-want, with a processing fee equivalent to almost a dollar."

<< In Rainbows >> is a 10-song collection of wildly different tracks. What's lacking is "OK Computer's" dissonance. There's not even a lot of melancholy. Just a lot of mellow.

"15 Step" starts the album with a clattering of dirty electronic rhythms that gradually coalesce under Thom Yorke's thin falsetto, moving languorously, almost boozy, then builds to an urgency that closes out the song.

"Bodysnatchers" is the power and grit standout. At one point, the guitars, buried under a stratosphere of effects, reveal themselves in high whining arcs then later as howls while Yorke shouts, "I see it coming! I see it coming!"

"All I Need" is about as close to a love song as Radiohead gets. Radiohead, the ambassadors of alienation, writing a love song? Yes, and here's a peek: "I'm an animal trapped in your parked car/I am all the days that you chose to ignore ... I am a moth who just wants to share your light/ I'm just an insect trying to get out of the night."

C 4 YOURSELVES -- --> http://www.last.fm/music/Radiohead/_/All+I+Need