Tomorrow's Modern Boxes

Like Radiohead's In Rainbows before it, Thom Yorke's Tomorrow's Modern Boxes initially made waves not for its music but for its distribution. Announced without warning and available as a paid "bundle" via BitTorrent -- it was not the first record distributed that way but it certainly was the most prominent -- Tomorrow's Modern Boxes shared the same shock of the new as In Rainbows, and although it's certainly written on a smaller scale than that 2007 record, it occupies a similar space within Yorke's extracurricular discography. In Rainbows represented an emotional thaw after the chilly, amorphous Hail to the Thief, whereas Tomorrow's Modern Boxes warms up the icy exteriors of Eraser. Yorke never attempts to abandon his fixation on pre-EDM electronica -- at this point, his affection for turn-of-the-millennium intelligent dance music could almost qualify as classicist -- but there's a scuffed warmth to much of this album, with the warped waves of keyboards gently gliding into a rhythm la