MUSIC REVIEW: RADIOHEAD - 'THE KING OF LIMBS'

Reaching Further, Digging Deeper, One of the Planet's Biggest Bands Sets Down Its Roots

By: Andrew Shaw

February 18, 2011

(Self-Released) Radiohead: They’ve always known how to do it. It seems like few bands on the planet have quite the same effect on their fans as Radiohead holds over their eager throngs. Like a comet with an almost but not quite predictable frequency of orbiting the Earth, releases from the Oxfordshire pioneers are eagerly awaited, celebrated, and salivated over by the geeks, the chic, the critics, and fans alike. Released today and only announced, for sure, five short days ago, The King of Limbs--Radiohead studio album number eight--arrives as a much anticipated surprise that we knew was coming soon but could never be quite sure when.

Ever environmentally friendly, all in love with the trees and everything, we’re once again in the sensible territory of the digital download with a following physical copy of biodegradable materials and Green-aware artwork. Once again constructed of stuff that demanded no trees were sacrificed to bring you what you want. Artful, guilt-free consumerism.

There’s one thing about Radiohead: sometimes you just have to try not to like them as much as you do. They release stuff and it’s familiar, but it’s like nothing you’ve ever heard before, and yet it still makes sense somehow. But this is music, and it’s not always meant to make sense; it’s just not like long division, traffic lights, and tax returns. 

You can argue that other bands do things in a similar style or that other artists revealed tricks that equalled Kid A before Kid A was conceived. Those arguments are dumb. Shut up. Stop trying to outsmart yourself. Just because you can splash paint doesn’t mean you’re Jackson Pollock. Setting fire to a guitar doesn’t make you Hendrix. Just because you can stand with your back to the wall doesn’t mean you’re the coolest kid at the disco. Today, once again, Radiohead is the coolest kid at the disco. If you’re a hipster, surely you can pretend that Radiohead is still obscure, not a mammoth commercial success, and you can permit yourself to not cut their heads off so you look taller. Let it go. Sometimes the cool, older kids at the disco really are genuinely elite, thoughtful, and accomplished.

The King of Limbs, an album that takes its name from a thousand-year-old tree within walking distance of the band’s recording studio, contains a bizarre sense of the aged, the old, the weathered. Now-familiar electronic work beats in from the outset, jazz signatures meander around tempos, and odd spirals twist out in all modernism, yet still there’s a sense of solidity, of strength. Radiohead has built a tree fort. There’s an organic feel coming up, wrapping around the synthesized. 

This is perhaps the first Radiohead album in some time that feels like it’s been offered up from original nature rather than wrestled to house the further reaches of musical imagination. A track like “Lotus Flower” is simply seductive; it rolls in with hand claps and Thom Yorke’s usual vocal explorations. His lyrics describe altered scale, singular vision, the search of freedom, the pursuit of enlightenment. An echo takes hold of drum and voice, and things go from peculiarly sexy to something spiritually clean and back again.

With a band that is unashamedly talkative both about how they’re perceived and the world that perceives them, an opening track named “Bloom” clatters in with a snare and binary set of bleeps that announces just how you’re expected to receive the incoming messages. You have to be open or some of this will pass you by.

Nigel Godrich is called in to produce, and produce he does. He brings the best of modernism to proceedings. Seeming to work with the band in order to forget that they’re there, instead he listens and reacts to the songs.  Wherever the material leads, he follows, like a surfer owning a wave.

With sampled sounds of nature and a sort of rustier edge to the electronica in some tracks, we shouldn’t be surprised by the time we reach “Codex.” A real piano plays a slowly spaced melody to offer up what certain listeners would call an old-fashioned song. The tempo is slow and measured. This is one of those exquisite Radiohead moments--luminous, dark, contradictory. It ends with birdsong, which welcomes in the next track and begs us to “Give up the Ghost.” Maybe things just got even more delicate--a gentle confrontation of what needs to be let go.

The King of Limbs may not be as surprising as Kid A. It may not have the same thrilling “pay what you like” sales approach as In Rainbows.  This isn’t a change of direction; this doesn’t say goodbye to anything, and it doesn’t alter perception of the band. Yet it’s no less innovative. What this collection does is fulfill the promise of those seeds experienced with Amnesiac. What’s contained is simply the Radiohead sound. The limbs are now further reaching. The roots are more deeply established. Stand up close with headphones or step back and play loud through speakers; both perspectives reveal an organism that houses other organisms and that dwells in a bigger biosphere. There’s no real bad view.  Sit with it awhile, alone.  You’ll see. There’s nothing here you’d want to cut.

For Fans Of: Sigur Ros, Mum, Kasabian, Pretty much any other alternative artist you can think of

Standout Tracks: “Bloom,” “Codex,” “Lotus Flower”