Radiohead's best song.end of.

The recent release of Radiohead's eighth LP has got me listening to their back catalogue again. Back to a time before Yorke and co became completely immersed in electronica, and increasingly outre sounds. This isn't to say Radiohead's later output is any less than brilliant, I just feel that the band reached their zenith with the twin peaks of The Bends and OK Computer. These albums transcended the drab brit pop of their peers, with intense, intelligent, truly epic guitar music.
                   If The Bends was a giant leap forward from Pablo Honey, OK Computer was a paradigm shift. Sonically, the band went to a different plane, there was just so much more going on on every level: lyrically, musically, and rhythmically. Anyway, this album has been rightly lauded, coming top of "greatest album ever" polls with  almost boring regularity, to such an extent that its greatness has become a kind of cliche.So I will say no more about the album as a whole, just one song. Let Down.
             This is without a doubt my favourite Radiohead song. It can be read as a comment on the emptiness of modern consumerist living, mortality, motion sickness, or just the essential pointlessness of life generally. Cheery stuff then, I hear you sigh. Well, yes, actually, not to be perverse but i find the whole thing mesmerising and, especially the second half of the song (from about the three minute mark), defiantly life affirming.
      As the drums get more and more complex and Yorke increasingly emotional, it's as if the song enacts what it describes and truly "grows wings;" leaving the monochrome everyday behind in a glorious crescendo of noise. The "wings twitch" image always reminds me of a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, transformed, just like Yorke's voice, from the mumbling sullen first verse, to the translucent urgency of the ending coda. The second half of the song has a liberated feel, like a kind of letting go; an acceptance of our state perhaps, or simply a successful escape from it.
                                  Regardless of the meaning, the result is a song of shimmering beauty. "Hysterical and useless" we may be, but if capable of making sounds like this, perhaps life is worth living after all.
And if Yorke's soaring falsetto doesn't give you the goosebumps then check yourself  for a pulse.......