I was a little bit surprised when I read in the Slate music club from last week which featured Radiohead's new album dissected via e-mail by Sasha Frere-Jones and Gerald Marzorati (NYT magazine) the following sentence by Frere-Jones:

On one hand I'd be very happy if this was true as I found the mixes which were leaked to the web absolutely perfect and could not imagine any improvement on them whatsoever.

On the other hand my feelings would be mixed as Radiohead's producer Nigel Godrich said that the tracks that leaked were the unmastered versions. If Frere-Jones is right Godrich has not been saying the truth (for marketing reasons?) which I find pretty inadequate and morally reproachable especially in the view of the album title.

So now I am not sure if I will buy the album anymore for two reasons. I was 100% sure before. But why should I buy an album which is identical to the mp3 versions and why should I buy an album of people who lie to me?

In the end I'll probably buy the album because I have the feeling it is the best album of the zero years yet. Before in my view that album was Amnesiac but Hail to the Thief seems to be even more of a miracle.

By the way this comes from someone who has kind of despised Radiohead and especially Thom Yorke's voice before. Interesting is this statement by Frere-Jones concerning the change of his voice:

P.S. The Slate e-mail exchange has been discussed here extensively on I Love Music!

I do not want to write about last night's Cat Power show at the Mousonturm. Just two or three sentences. It was the most pitiful, disgraceful and abominable concert I have ever seen in my life. Not really a concert, more a performance gone terribly wrong. Chan Marshall was totall drunk and certainly on other drugs as well. Her band left her alone on stage after maybe thirty minutes of very badly performed songs by her. Then she was talking drunkard's gibberish mixed with many insults to the audience and didn't manage to play one song on her own. I regretted not having taken a video camera to film her and to give her the tape as a present to show her her face this night.