The Singles Jukebox

Forgot to clear out all our social media accounts before posting this…

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Patrick St. Michel: Dear 15-year-old self — This will come as a shock, but one day you aren’t going to care about Radiohead like you do now. Let me immediately qualify that! It’s not like all the experiences you are having with them now are going to vanish, continue crying to “Let Down” in your room after school, it gets better, trust me. But you aren’t going to make listening to Kid A once a day a priority like you do now. You will stuff all of those albums into the Case Logic you take around with you, and eventually forget where you put it…and be kinda OK with it. Don’t be too shocked — it sounds bleak, but that’s only because teenagers can never imagine life past next week. Still, I’m writing you because, even though the band whose lyrics you scribble in notebooks when you are bored will one day not be the group you volunteer as “your favorite,” you should remember to keep a little joy hidden away for them. You are going to hear a new — well, they are probably working on it while you are reading this — Radiohead song full of darty strings and cryptic lyrics and Thom wailing. It’s great, but you might log on to Twitter — oh shit, so in the future all the soul-crushing parts of OK Computer come true — and see people being really obnoxious about it, and it will make you question if you are just being overly sentimental about it all. Well, don’t think too much about it, just give in and keep in mind that Radiohead will always remind you of being a teenager in all the good and bad ways.
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Cassy Gress: I was convinced this was Owen Pallett at first — I couldn’t hear the Radiohead in those pizzicato stringed instruments and yawning bass. But then Thom Yorke flips up to his gentle, heavily reverbed falsetto for the chorus, the strings take a few steps back, and there it is, that vaguely pensive sense of dread common to so many other Radiohead songs. Once that framework asserts itself, the entire rest of the song fits firmly, and mostly successfully, into place, regardless of whatever else it might be reminding me of.
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Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: Back in the day, Radiohead would take this beautifully paranoid topline and throw in layers upon layers of guitar noise and/or a plethora of electronic bleep-bloops. Instead, they’ve gone for the density and the tension of Jonny Greenwood’s LCO-assisted orchestrations — reminiscent of his own work in The Master — and that is the best decision they’ve made in a decade. 
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Alfred Soto: The strings still have a malevolent tang, and Colin Greenwood’s bass gets a cortisone injection, but because I’ve never cared what Thom Yorke mewls about or the mewl itself I’m dismissing it as another example of Radiohead’s facile paranoia, their projecting portent into a cliché or slogan that can’t support it.
[4]

Jer Fairall: Sounding much more like one of Johnny Greenwood’s anxious, discordant film scores with a Thom Yorke vocal grafted onto it than any of the band’s more recent electro-dabblings, “Burn the Witch” actually feels like the kind of left-turn that the band once made their critical reputation with before settling into an increasingly predictable post-millennial career. It’s Yorke’s performance that provides the weak link here, though; once capable of delivering cathartic bursts of hysteria in the midst of songs whose structures allowed for such jarring tonal shifts, his politeness prevents this admirable and even refreshing composition from becoming a truly exciting one.
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Brad Shoup: All these stock phrases and dire pronouncements, the ceaseless throb of one political note on an impeccably recorded piano: perhaps they should be seen as symptoms of an alienation, rather than its expression. The same fixation on sloganeering appears in the fantastic erotic/romantic songs they’ve been knocking out the last decade or so, but the textures — the bare sound of need — is where they’ve continued to excel. So, of course, here’s one more protest song, where Yorke’s wail and Johnny Greenwood’s staccato string clicks form a sort of high-velocity disease vector. It whisks you along and leaves you at the edge of a roof. 
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Will Adams: The lyric conceit isn’t uncharted territory, even for Radiohead, but with an arrangement like this, it’s more convincing and terrifying than ever. The strings ebb and flow, struck instead of bowed, turning them into daggers poised to drop at any moment. They form the basis of a bustling arrangement, beautifully held together by Yorke’s thready vocal.
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Megan Harrington: Listening to “Burn the Witch,” I’m reminded of the verse of “Song of Childhood” that goes “When the child was a child,/ It played with enthusiasm,/ and, now, has just as much excitement as then,/ but only when it concerns its work.” Radiohead were a chore, for a long time they were work. My childhood being over, the sense of wonderment at their modern marvels hardened into something more like duty or loyalty. “Burn the Witch” reminds me of this because “Burn the Witch” makes me enthusiastic about Radiohead again. After the constant lethargy of prescription medication — that last thought you remember before Xanax claims your corpse for twelve hours or the blissy low drone of hydrocodone — we’ve finally got a sensation instead of the absence of sensation. “Burn the Witch” sounds like flying a helicopter around a medium sized city on a sunny day only to experience total engine failure and fall from the sky, not to certain death but to life in this world. It’s Radiohead frothed to their panicky best. 
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