Like every other person in the country who is remotely interested in recorded sounds, I have, for the past ten days, been listening intently to the new Radiohead album, The King of Limbs, and, to a lesser extent, PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake. While my first impression of Yorke & Co’s new dispatch (once I’d managed to blank out all the Dancing Thom YouTube silliness) was familiar disappointment at the lack of so-called standout songs (a well-worn complaint since the dawn of the millenium), I quickly started to enjoy the record’s understated and unusual qualities; the spidery percussion, looping basslines and detuned guitars. Like everything Radiohead have done since OK Computer, it’s eminently interesting background music, without the lyrical or era-defining focus of their mid/late 90s output.

But then isn’t Yorke’s commitment to cryptic,  throwaway messages, disorientating time signatures and dubious dance moves becoming a little tiresome, a bit predictable in itself? Wouldn’t it be more refreshing if Radiohead were to unpack their guitars and produce a truly monumental record that didn’t sound like the studio noodlings of five self-indulged 40-something men but took on the absurdities and injustices of 21st century life with the kind of burning anger that underpinned tracks like ‘Paranoid Android’ or the caustic cynicism of ‘Just’?

I’m breaking my own habit here, by the way. I’ve always defended and applauded Yorke’s risky reconfiguring of the Radiohead sound following their huge early success, and the constant complaints from Dad Rockers around the nation about the lack of big, distorted guitars are misguided at best.

But the reason I’m questioning this latest journey into the leftfield from the Oxford group is partly provoked by first listens of Let England Shake, which surfaced just four days before The King of Limbs. It is in many ways the other side of the coin: angry, evocative, political. It is radical in meaning if not in style. It boasts memorable songs with choruses and verses and everything. In short, it’s not background music, because it demands attention.

As a die-hard Radiohead fan that’s what I’d like to see from Yorke. A full-on artistic assault, rather than an interesting-sounding retreat. He’s obviously an engaged, informed, sceptical guy, and it’s time he channelled more of this energy into Radiohead.

A few weeks ago a friend and fellow music writer called Finbarr Bermingham (a fine Irish name) asked me to contribute to a feature he’s running on his blog, where various scribes are picking their top five albums of the past decade.

I put it off for a while as it’s not the easiest task to whittle down everything you’ve listened to over the past ten years into five standout LPs, but then one evening I thought I’d stop procrastinating and just do it. Finbarr was looking for personal choices, not some kind of authoritative barometer of the decade, so I just shortlisted the albums that had stuck with me, the few I can still enjoy after hundreds of plays.

And the top five I came up with? Well, here they are, in no particular order:

Radiohead – Amnesiac
OutKast – Speakerboxx / The Love Below
Midlake – The Trials of Van Occupanther
The Strokes – Is This It
The Knife – Silent Shout

You can read my reasons for choosing them in full over on Finbarr’s blog.

If he asked me to do this in six months time I’d probably come up with five completely different choices, but there you go. If you haven’t heard one of the five I recommend you give it a spin, as they’re (obviously) all extremely good.

And what are your top five albums of the Noughties? I’ll give you a few weeks to post your comment.