Turn It Up

“How come I end up where I started?” Yorke sings at the outset. “How come I end up where I went wrong?

” On the opening “15 Steps,” Radiohead flirts with R B production. Syncopated electro-beats bounce to the front of the mix, while Yorke’s voice curls languidly around a jazzy guitar figure. “Bodysnatchers” follows, with malice: a guitar through an over-taxed amplifier, a trance-inducing groove, and then Yorke’s vocal becoming increasingly unhinged until he yelps the words “sawed off” as if losing a limb in his best Johnny Rotten rasp.

Subliminal bass, glacial synthesizers, and Yorke’s high and lonesome voice conspire to make “Nude” sound utterly beautiful on the surface. But underneath, the mood is downright eerie, and the album begins to flow in this uneasy direction. Like “Nude,” “Weird Fishes” manages to sound both rapturous and cautionary.

It builds an elegant orchestral edifice that teeters atop a skittering groove, an apt sonic metaphor for the emotional fragility that underpins most of the lyrics. “All I Need” builds in slow-motion to a crescendo of cymbals, and “Faust Arp” wraps a contemplative folk meditation inside woozy strings. “Reckoner” finds Yorke crooning in falsetto over a loose lattice-work of percussion knick-knacks.

A handful of piano chords are parceled out, and the song turns into a gloriously destitute hymn. “House of Cards” provides redemption. It suggests Radiohead doing Jobim, a long-distance nod to bossa nova with pensive guitar, a relaxed soul-singer vocal, and an unusually direct lyric.

“I don’t want to be your friend, I just want to be your lover,” Yorke sings. That momentary flash of go-for-broke optimism crashes into the dyspeptic “Jigsaw Falling into Place,” which traces a relationship’s promise and dissolution with scrappy guitars and drums. Then “Videotape” lands, a stately voice-and-piano elegy undercut by off-kilter percussion.

The singer stands in judgment at the gates of heaven. Mephistopholis lurks at his heels. But his thoughts are with the one he left behind: “You are my center when I spin away.