If you haven’t already guessed, I have to mention that The King Of Limbs is an intensely personal listening experience, best suited to being played back on headphones as you walk in a daze to destinations unknown, rather than being something to enjoy in company.
[Purchase] You’ve probably caught wind of the frantic struggle that has recently possessed music journalists across the world, all of whom were desperately trying to keep up with a notoriously difficult Oxfordshire quintet. The new Radiohead album, The King Of Limbs, supposedly named after a 1000-year-old oak tree near where they recorded parts of 2007’s In Rainbows, was announced out of the blue on Valentine’s Day for release on Saturday 19 February 2011, which was then brought forward by 24 hours, because “there was no need to wait,” according to the band. This all meant that the mainstream media, if we can briefly imagine that they were somehow collected in the same horrific room, attempted to tear each other limb from limb (pun, sadly, intended) in order to land the first review, even if that meant that said review was shat out after just one measly listen, as was the case with UK newspaper The Guardian and their music journalist Tim Jonze, leading to nothing but hollow, empty, dried-up husks of sentences that will no doubt be completely revised as time goes by.
The funniest thing about all of this is that each and every one of these stampeding, berserker-mode journalists had to pay for their copy of the album, which encourages me to draw a comparison with Apple, who point-blank refuse to supply review models of any of their products, even if that product is as lame as, say, GarageBand – you may be able to tell by my tone that I’ve had numerous negative experiences in dealing with the Cupertino massive. The reason being, of course, that Steve Jobs knows full well that any publication worth its salt will be obliged to whip out the company credit card and buy the latest iPhone/iPad/MBP as soon as it comes out, all in order to nail the definitive review before any rivals steal their thunder.
Not that I’m immune to this rather sneaky flashflood marketing ploy. I would have quite happily sold my only pair of shoes to get the new Radiohead album on release day. Luckily, however, my girlfriend saved me from that particular shoeless fate by very kindly pre-ordereding me the £30 Newspaper Album (more on this bizarre product and its pricing structure later), the digital version of which I duly downloaded as soon as word started spreading around the interwebs on the Friday. Despite this, I wish to stress that I’ve had the album on a near-enough constant loop since that time and must have easily racked up some 15-20 listens so far, simply for the purposes of this review – we are, after all, as Hunter S. Thompson used to say, professionals. I’ve also tried my very best to avoid reading other reviews for fear of them tainting my own efforts with phrases like breaking new ground and saving the music industry. Well, all except the review I mentioned earlier, but that was principally done so I could mock Tim Jonze and his ilk.
Anyway, enough of this perambulatory waffle. Let’s get down to the business end of proceedings. The King Of Limbs kicks off on a track called “Bloom,” which opens up with a heavily-manipulated tape-style piano loop, strange synth patterns, a rather scattered beat and an almost dub-like bassline. If at first you’re a little lost, don’t worry, as Thom Yorke’s miraculous voice comes in soon enough to give the track focus and direction. As always, it’s a challenging start to another challenging album, yet the synthetic 70s-esque strings parts, blended with reverberating brass and some angelically sung harmonies in the chorus, are particularly arresting.
“Morning Mr Magpie,” the second tune, sees three separate guitar parts spread across the stereo panorama, providing rhythm, melody and harmony in typical latter-day Radiohead fashion. Yorke is again mesmerizing, making you quite literally hang on each and every one of his words. The breakdown section is definitely worth checking out, too, with the vocals buried under a mountain of reverb and absolutely packed full of beautiful harmonies. Things swiftly return to the far dryer opening motif, though, almost haltingly so, but then even this section takes a gradual route towards heavily effected washes of ambience before the track’s close. At this point, if you haven’t already guessed, I have to mention that The King Of Limbs is an intensely personal listening experience, best suited to being played back on headphones as you walk in a daze to destinations unknown, rather than being something to enjoy in company.
Third tune, “Little By Little,” follows a similar formula, although there’s a distinctly Latino flavour in the percussion department, with hints of a guiro lurking in the background and plenty of cross rhythms battling for your attention. Things really begin to flow on the next track, “Feral,” by which time you’re more used to the machinegun rhythms and sparse layers of FX that populate this album. Here, the vocals become an instrument in their own right, coming across as completely unintelligible nonsense yet effected in such a way that it has real emotional weight.
As it happens, the first track I heard was the fifth number, “Lotus Flower,” via the fairly weird promo video (see below), which sees Yorke resembling a smashed-out-of-his-gourd dad at a wedding. To be honest, I didn’t think much of this quite basic tune on my initial listen, but as with much of Radiohead’s output, it grows on you in a pleasing, warm, loving way, and is actually one of the LP’s strongest songs – I say much of their output, because, let’s face it, the sickly sweet melodies of OK Computer’s “No Surprises” actually get more enervating with each listen. Backing up Yorke’s gorgeous vocal lines on this ditty is a rather militant groove, made up of repetitive yet foot-tapping drumming from Phil Selway, some cheeky clap rhythms (acted out by Yorke in the aforementioned video) and Colin Greenwood’s deceptively melodic basslines. Everything comes together, as with most of the tracks on TKOL, with the ‘Head’s excellent use of reverb, echo and filtering, suddenly shunting things to the foreground before they trail off into the nether regions of the mix, giving each tune an added emotional push and pull like no other band. There’s also more than a hint towards loungesteppers such as James Blake, Mount Kimbie and Pangaea in the extremely warm chord progressions.
“Codex” is more of a straight-forward piano ballad, albeit with a very soft, unnervingly slow techno rhythm underpinning proceedings, coupled with Yorke taking centre stage more so than at any other point on the album. Again, there’s another section where brass and voice come together with spectacular effect.
Penultimate tune, “Give Up The Ghost,” is perhaps the most poppy track, though it’s probably my least favourite of the whole album, seeming to drift rather aimlessly with very repetitive guitar chords and looping vocals until its conclusion. That’s not to say it’s terrible, but just less interesting than the rest of what the Oxford lads have offered up to this point. It’s certainly a nice tune, but a little too nice. Then again, maybe it’ll make more sense after a few weeks of living with the album. The same accusations can be leveled at the final tune, “Separator,” especially in the first half, which is a bit of a let down (yes, the pun is intended again).
In my opinion, Radiohead are the same as every other truly innovative act to grace our ears over the years, but they get far more credit than most. They never come up with something completely brand spanking new, as is often suggested, which is another way of saying that they never do things in a bubble. It would instead be better to state that they have very wide and educated listening tastes (their website shows them currently listening to Moderat, Untold and Christophe Rousset, among others, for example), which they manage to use very skillfully to inform their own works of art. A great example is the supposedly radical sound of 2000’s Kid A, whereas closer inspection reveals that a tune such as “Idioteque” uses short samples of Paul Lansky’s track “Mild und Leise,” and let’s fess up right now, it also owes one hell of a lot to Autechre’s landmark 1995 album Tri Repetae. Then again, it must also be noted that they took Lansky’s track in a totally different direction and Autechre never had access to a singer of Thom Yorke’s caliber, so let’s just say that Radiohead tend to put their own unique and very welcome touch on things.
So, with most of the overblown, almost mythical stories surrounding five human beings busted wide open, let’s get back to The King Of Limbs and wrap this thing up. Coming in at around the 37-minute mark, the album is remarkably short, which has started the rumour mills grinding over the possibility that it’s only the first half of a much larger work. To be fair, there are some pretty big hints that this is actually the case: The last track is called “Separator” (where Yorke croons the line “if you think this is over, then you’re wrong”), the WAV version is curiously titled “TKOL1” and the full-on package (see below) contains two 10” slabs o’ wax, which some commentators say provides an unnecessary amount of space considering the LP’s length. Then again, this could all be bollocks. Whatever the case may be, I’ll leave it for you and your mates to discuss in your own time.
If you are determined to buy The King Of Limbs, regardless of what the mainstream press have been saying about it, which version should you go for? Well, there are two digital versions, containing either 320kbps MP3s or CD-quality WAVs, which cost £6 and £9 respectively, or the so-called Newspaper Album, comprising two clear 10” vinyl, a CD, newspaper-style artwork, 625 pieces of smaller artwork, an oxo-degradable case/holder/binder thingy and the aforementioned digital download. Opting for the latter version, priced at either £30 or £33 depending on the quality of digital files you want, means you get to download the album straight away and receive all the fancy extras in the post from Monday 9 May onwards. And I’ve got to say, I can’t wait for that day to arrive.
Phew, what a weekend! So there you have it: Half an album (possibly), some of it utterly beautiful and some of it rather oblique at times, but all of it most-definitely impossible to ignore.
