Despite What's Been Said, This Is A Great Album!!!
I don't know where this album ranks in terms of the band's entire catalog, but I absolutely love it. I've loved it from day one (yes, I bought it on the day it came out). I didn't feel compelled to write a review on Hail To The Thief until I started reading magazine articles about In Rainbows. I agree that In Rainbows is a masterpiece in its own right, but Thief is a great album as well. It infuriates me that even the band is starting to second guess the genius of this album. In all the interviews I've read the band basically apologizes for this album, which is ridiculous. It's actually an insult to people who were truly moved by the material on HTTT. Until IR was released, this was the best album of the new millenium. Don't listen to the naysayers. This album is a wonderful mixture of the old guitar driven Radiohead (The Bends, Ok Computer) and the more adventurous, experimental Radiohead (Kid A, Amnesiac). No band should apologize for the work they produced in the past. This is the space they inhabited at that time and this how they chose to express themselves. For me, Hail To The Thief actually confirmed, in my mind, that Radiohead is the greatest musical phenomenon since The Beatles. I'll never forget when I saw the band perform live during the HTTT tour. They opened with There There and it totally blew me away. I implore the band to stop soiling my memories with negative vibes. This is a great album and a worthy addition to the Radiohead catalog.

The Album that Defined a Decade
Let me be frank: I hate this decade. Everything about it is dark and depressing, no matter who you are, where you are, or what you believe. It's the decade that has seen the full fruition of American divide between red-state right-wingers who have one type of wisdom but are closed-minded, and blue-state left-wingers who have another type of wisdom but express a fascist attitude. Both sides have principles, both sides lack moral perfection. And both sides are only half correct to this Libertarian. The events of this decade have magnified this divide to an alarming degree: the 2000 elections, 9/11, the Iraq War, and the culture wars. I'm optimistic that decades or even centuries from now a unified Libertarian world will look back on this time and shake their heads at the childish prison too many of us inhabited so willingly. And they'll also probably want to know what it could be like to live back then. Well, if I were to make a suggestion to them, I would tell them go listen to `Hail To the Thief', by Radiohead. For no other record has captured the dark all-pervasive atmosphere that has settled over this era like a shadow, or, The Gloaming, as the band themselves refer to it.

The Sound and the Atmosphere:
This album is a continuation of the sound they began with 'Kid A'. Or, more concisely, think of the songs 'Optimistic', 'You And Whose Army', 'Pyramid Song', 'Idioteque', and 'Like Spinning Plates', and you'll have a very accurate idea of what this album sounds like, only taken to a new level of sonic and melodic intricacy. EVERY song here conveys a dark atmosphere, and it's certainly not an uplifting listen, but it is a very engrossing and haunting one.

The Words and the Message:
Like the melodies, the lyrics here range from VERY depressing and angry, to resilient and hopeful. The main message the words convey here is a feeling of helplessness in the face of an intolerable ignorance that is powerful and has authority. But there is also a message of quiet resolve to stick with ones own convictions and ride out the storm.

The Songs:
'2+2=5' (The bands best opener to date. Guitar driven, it starts out slowly and then explodes halfway through, and then ends abruptly.)
'Sit Down, Stand Up' (A fast piano-driven song. fantastically builds to a piano bridge that collapses into a cacophony of electronic bleeps.)
'Sail To the Moon' (EXTREMELY dark atmosphere. Another piano song, slow-paced this time. Very haunting.)
'Backdrifts' (Electronic, yet very melodic. Fast-paced. Great guitar embellishments and piano solo.)
'Go To Sleep' (A fast-paced acoustic song that really has a great climax.)
'Where I End And You Begin' (One of Radiohead's very best. Very fast-paced with an incredibly haunting atmosphere. A blend of guitar rock and electronica.)
'We Suck Young Blood' (A little over the top, and the creepy atmosphere seems a little forced. Slow-paced for the most part, but it breaks into a excellent piano solo towards the end.)
'The Gloaming' (An electric loop, just a bunch of noise in my opinion. Has a VERY haunting atmosphere and imagery, however.
'There There' (Another one of the best songs the band has done. A very fast-paced, catchy, and guitar-driven song. Features the best climax of any Radiohead song.)
'I Will' (A slow, quiet, and lovely little song. A sort of dark lullaby. Hopeful yet melancholy.)
'Punch Up At a Wedding' (Almost a funk/reggae song. Slow and piano driven.)
'Myxomatosis' (A rather annoying bunch of noise, imo. Sounds like a million zippers being pulled up and down at once.)
'Scatterbrain' (A great reflective kind of song. Slow, with a gentle guitar accompaniment. Te only truly upbeat song on the album.)
'A Wolf at the Door' (A dark closer about a hostage situation, a very fitting summation of the sound and content of the album. Electronic and very fast-paced.)

Overall:
This album is the definitive Radiohead experience in my opinion, just as the 'Joshua Tree' is for U2. There are three weak songs on the album, and even though the album could have done without them, as-is they still lend to the whole dark atmosphere, and thus enrich the listening journey. It will always remind me of my youth, of growing up during an uncertain time.
And most of all, this record gloriously maintains the assertion that music above all transcends whatever legacy may be left of the period it came from.

A little dull
Frankly I thought this album was dead boring. Then again I don't really like Radiohead in the first place. If you do like them I guess you'd probably like this album, but if you prefer your music a little more lively it might not be for you.

Best Radiohead to date
I remember when this came out I was a young buck and my musical tastes, as always, were rapidly changing. I was just coming out of a period were I was into bands like Godsmack and Three Days Grace and Papa Roach and other bands of the like that I am now extremely embarressed to associate myself with. Hail to the Thief was the first Radiohead CD, aside from a live one which I don't count, that I ever heard. I used to listen to it while I cleaned my barracks room or played Ghost Recon with my friend. I didn't get it the first half dozen times I listened to it and then gradually I started liking it more and more. I can honestly say that this album just gets better and better with each listen, and I have probably listened to the whole album about 50 times now. Now, I am not prone to hyperbole normally, but this is a masterpiece. I have read other critics who don't like the dissenence or the praise that radiohead gets. I, however, as a songwriter, know how easy it is to get trapped into playing tonic, 4th, 5th, and minor 6th based songs, since theory is set in stone and those 12 notes between ocaves, and their intervals, and the laws of harmony are more or less set in stone. So it is really refreshing to find Chopin's, Beethoven's and in my opinion, Radioheads - musicians who can make amazing, unique, listenable music with odd intervals. Not to mention the incredible rhythms that sound like a map of a dream. And to top that all off is Thom Yorke's amazing surreal lyrics. I think my first love was of Mxysamatosis. I can't go into the specific lines of lyric that are outstanding because I would be writing all night. This album is also a concept album in that it is unified by a theme and works better being listened to as a whole album than just a song here and there, although certain songs can be enjoyed outside the frame of the album, such as There, There. You may ask what theme is it? To which I would reply, to me, it's dreamish, and haunting. It reminds me the oxymoron of feeling smart and different and completely isolated from everyone else because of ackward social skills. This album has gotten flak from my friends for being pretentious. It is not pretentious at all. I don't know how anyone could honestly believe that. I certainly know that some musicians use different intervals and rhythms for the sake of being different, which I don't know whether I should think that's bad or good. But this album definetly does not that fit that category. Listen to it and you know that there is no other way to express Radiohead's soul than this complex sound. It is complex by nature, not by virtue of being complex. This album has been there for me in so many good and bad times of my life and has never failed to make me feel amazing. I remember reading M. Ward on the linear notes of a John Fahey album talking about if it was possible to have a significant moment in one's life, comprable to a first love, or the death of a parent, by hearing an album. I think every music fanatic knows that this is most definetly true, and this album along with Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, John Fahey's Yellow Princess stands as one of the pillars of my musical foundation. I can not imagine my life without this album.

An entertaining synthesis of their rock and IDM sides, but with much dead weight
There was a lot of suspense in the months leading up to Radiohead's 2003 album HAIL TO THE THIEF. No one was sure if the band would go further into the IDM territory of the electronics-laden KID A and Amnesiac, or if they would return to the more radio-friendly style of their masterpiece OK COMPUTER.

HAIL TO THE THIEF surprisingly managed to include both styles. In some songs, such as "2 + 2 = 5" or "Sail to the Moon", traditional instruments are in the fore. On other songs, especially "The Gloaming", "Where I End and You Begin", "Backdrifts" the sound is mainly electronics-based. There's also some fresh new elements, such as the use of three percussionists in "There There". Lyrically, the album often returns to some extent to the theme of existential crisis that made OK COMPUTER so perfectly capture the Zeitgeist. "2 + 2 = 5", "Sail to the Moon", "Backdrifts", and "The Gloaming" express uncertainty over our future and distrust in our politicians and decision makers, but thankfully without political references that would be quickly dated.

Unfortunately, HAIL TO THE THIEF is padded with several songs that would have been better relegated to b-sides. Instead of a tight and consistently quality album, the band inexplicably dediced to include the uncharacteristic classic rock "A Punch-Up at a Wedding", the very generic "Scatterbrain" and "I Will", and the unsatisfying closer "A Wolf at a Door". As one major critic's review stated, it's a good album instead of a great one. Overall, I personally prefer OK COMPUTER and IN RAINBOWS to it.