As I write, I’m listening to the second disc of “In Rainbows” for, I think, the third time. First impressions, then. The eight tracks shouldn’t be considered as offcuts, as inferior cousins of the songs that made it onto the first set; in fact, I’ve a hunch that some Radiohead fans might actually prefer some of the songs here. Because there’s plenty on this bonus disc (from the beautiful box set; great heft) that fits snugly into a certain Radiohead stereotype. If “In Rainbows” proper had a new looseness, a refreshing lightness of touch underscoring Thom Yorke’s melodious worrying, many of these songs feel bleaker, more tense. The titles in themselves – “Four Minute Warning”, "Last Flowers To The Hospital", “Down Is The New Up” – intimate a precise, classically Radiohead-esque gloom. It begins with “Mk 1”, effectively a ghostly ambient reprise of “Videotape”, starting where the first set left off. There are three more solemn ballads roughly in that vein, though “Go Slowly” carries trace elements, I think (my knowledge of all this as a Radiohead latecomer is hazy), of “Nice Dream”. Best of this batch is “Last Flowers To The Hospital”, which starts with, Yorke opining, “Appliances have gone berserk, I cannot keep up”, resolves into a stately piano ballad, then elegantly switches melody for the last minute – the best minute, in fact, of the album. The harder, faster tracks have affinities with the stuff we already know of the new Radiohead: “Down Is The New Up” has that vaguely soulful feel in Yorke’s vocal, and in the way some of the rhythms echo the American R&B of a few years back. Again, Phil Selway’s drums are the most striking feature, even more so on “Bangers And Mash”, which continues an idea prompted by, say, “15 Step”, that what Radiohead have mastered this time out is a sort of organic, guitar/bass/drums reconfiguration of the classic Warp electronica that so inspired them circa “Kid A”. With “Bangers And Mash”, though, the sense is of a band clashing textures over a manic, splattery rhythm track that the Aphex Twin or Squarepusher might have conceived at their most malicious. It isn’t difficult music – far from it – but it is knotted, edgy, and it feels neurotic rather than liberated. The disc works best as a sort of downbeat caveat to “In Rainbows”, one which possibly makes explicit the Jeremiad themes of the first set. Or maybe, thinking as I write, it’s better seen as a bridge between Radiohead’s previous albums and “In Rainbows”, a journal of a band going through some graceful, subtle transition and – though I guess most of their long-term fans would struggle to countenance such a fact – actually getting better, too.

News reaches me from my house that the Radiohead discbox has turned up, with another CD of new songs to go with the ones we already know from the "In Rainbows" download. I'll try and get my head round those in time to blog tomorrow. But in the meantime, I've just received a hefty volume about Elliott Smith that's been put together by the photographer, Autumn De Wilde. Flicking through, it looks great, and it really hammers home something that bugs the shit out of me when people often talk or write about Smith. It's just too easy to write about him as this "troubled", "unhappy", "doomed" figure, to spend an hour with a profoundly shy man and divine from it that he was somehow not long for this world. Of course, Smith had problems: at times, when I was never quite sure whether he was talking on or off the record, he was fairly explicit about them to me. But really, the habit of simplifying his life into one inexorable downward spiral winds me up time and time again; it reminds me, too, how glib writers can come across - and i've certainly been guilty of this - when they try and psychoanalyse their subjects. Anyway, my point is, De Wilde's book mainly features her pictures of Elliott, and they capture things about him that those mythologisers of depression chose not to see. They're intimate, candid, and often manage to transcend the awkwardness that he sometimes felt in front of a camera. It's clear that De Wilde had a real rapport with him that she built up over the years, so that a warmth and playfulness emerges, as he goofs about in a Key Largo t-shirt on a crowded pavement, or fashions a Billy Childish-style handlebar moustache out of some gaffer tape. I’m skimming through the text now, which seems to be conversations between De Wilde and various of Elliott’s friends, and that sense of his warmth and humanity, an idea that he actually had three dimensions, comes across. “It’s hard for people to imagine Elliott Smith running,” she writes. “Everyone saw him as such a still, quiet, sad person.” Joanna Bolme, his ex and Steve Malkmus’ great bassist, talks about Elliott being practical, cooking and driving, loving The Scorpions, Chicago. There’s stuff about him stumbling into fights out of some noble, maybe stupid desire to protect friends. Obviously I haven’t read the entire thing in half an hour, but the book comes across as a much more plausible portrait of an artist than usual, because it focuses on little details, about what he was like a lot of the time, rather than how he was perceived through his songs. There’s an interesting quote I’ve just spotted from Sam Coomes, the Quasi frontman and a regular Elliott sideman, where he says, “Elliott was sort of actively involved in his own sort of mythmaking. . . and it was something that I kind of frowned on.” Coomes’ inference, I guess, is that all the miserablist profiles of Smith acted as a kind of double bluff: if everyone thinks he’s sad, they won’t really know what he’s really like – the happy parts as well as the sad parts. But then I listen to the CD that comes with the book, and I’m reminded – wasn’t it always obvious that Smith was complicated in a good way, as well as a bad way? The five tracks are from some solo live show in LA, from around 1997. He plays flesh-prickling, close-up versions of “Angeles”, “Between The Bars”, and “Clementine”, has a go at Coomes’ Quasi song, “Clouds”, then splutters and giggles his way through Hank Williams Jr’s “All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down”. Doubtless, the song’s sentiments amused him, and even I’m forced to admit that his high, thin voice is an awkward fit for trad country. But as he flubs the notes and forgets the lyrics, Smith seems vulnerable in a way that’s very different to how he’s usually portrayed, a healthy and funny way that’s much closer to how I remember him. And then, cutely, he lines up some ammunition for those corny reviewers who are looking for intimations of mortality as a kiss-off line. “You weren’t thrown off by my fuck-up,” he says at the end of the disc, “because there’s more in store. . .” Good ones, I bet.