Concern

What In Rainbows, the discbox, does, and why it makes it so successful, is that it makes you feel like you’ve received a gift from the band, a little present to explore.

I mean, it’s $80, and it feels like a deluxe edition and worth the price: the packaging is heavy and high-quality, you get the album on two heavy 45 RPM records, the album on CD, and a bonus CD, along with big liner notes and lyrics sheets, and a record-sized booklet with nothing but big art prints. It feels well made, and is a very high-quality way to deliver an album. But niceness isn’t the key, here; additionally, on top of it being a well-made album (sonically, and physically), there’s simply the experience of holding it, taking the record folio out of the gray sleeve it comes in, opening it up, flipping through the lyrics sheet that’s attached to the right side, seeing how the CDs are held into the packaging (the center dots are little foam rubber discs), taking out the booklet and flipping through its colorful pages. This is exploration, tactile and visual: you have a good few minutes to experience something large, real, and new. You can do this while you play the album for the first time, or just experience the packaging for a while before you pop the CD into your computer, or unsheathe the clean black disc of the record and pop it onto your turntable (there are, I posit, few inanimate objects sexier than a brand-new vinyl record). There are things to do with this record that aren’t intellectual, wordy, or even imbued with any meaning: just that moment of physical discovery of an object, something we’ve done since we were young, before reason and thought overtook us.

These things are important.

The music works on the same level. It works on many levels, but so far I’ve found that just listening to it, without thinking about it much, offers a lot. I’m going very much on gut reaction now, especially with the bonus disc, since I haven’t given it a close listening yet. On a visceral level it’s honest, fuck-it-let’s-sit-and-daydream, abandoning pretense and style, and just yell for a while about kinds of happiness and worry and sadness that are real and adult, but hover on the edge of expression. It’s a vague, happy unease, that I’m pleased to sit in for a while.