| It’s a good thing about the drums and the Orchestra of St John’s (who’d done the strings for “Pyramid Song” back back near the beginning of things; they’re here with some very cinematic sweeps of bass-heavy string-swells), too: “Dollars and Cents” has the weakest lyric of the album so far. It’s Yorke on autopilot, panicked by the modern world & its awful way of burying the individual under store receipts and red tape, et cetera. Bureaucracy and its malcontents, the individual falling victim to the facelessness of the world in which he must live, the cruelty of the dispassionate quotidian routine -- we’ve heard this from Yorke before. It’s admittedly one of his more powerful points of obsession: there’s something very potent in the way he paints the crossroads in history at which he sees the individual -- you, or me -- standing, not knowing where to go, not wanting to go anywhere. Here, though, it seems a step back from some the riskier games of chicken he’s been playing. |