[MUSIC] Radiohead - The King of Limbs

Early review
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http://www.noisenoisenoise.co.uk/view.asp?ID=63&CID=

By: Dan Lucas
Radiohead – The King of Limbs

It’s February 14th, Valentine’s Day, and it’s fallen on a Monday.

The love of your life, the one girl or boy who will always be truly special to you has been away for a long time; lost overseas, taking some time out, doing other things, but they call you up that morning with the best news: they’ll be back on Saturday morning, and you’ll get to be together again.

All week they tease you, seducing you with mysterious, uh, Tweets, in the middle of the night in a strange far Eastern language, offering sly innuendo. Excited, you wake up Friday morning intending to prepare for your loved ones imminent arrival and **** THEY’RE HERE ALREADY!

Excited and not really knowing what to expect you jump into bed with them, and the metaphor wears from tenuous to wafer-thin. Radiohead’s new album dropped 24 hours early this morning, an unexpected treat from a band that has spent the past 17 year managing to surprise fans and critics alike with an impressive regularity.

The King of Limbs is instantly recognisable as a Radiohead record. Such hallmarks as Thom Yorke’s haunting falsetto – surprisingly powerful for a man who has been using it for nearly 20 of his 42 years – as well as Jonny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien’s delicate effects are all present and correct. And yet this somehow sounds like nothing Radiohead have done before.

Producer Nigel Godrich’s trademark “swoosh” sound that became so synonymous with the band after OK Computer, and returned with a vengeance on 2007’s In Rainbows is almost muted here by a backdrop of loops and beats propelled by Phil Selway’s almost machine-like drum patterns and Colin Greenwood’s driving bass, heavier and more prominent on this record that any previously.

If this makes it sound as though Radiohead have gone back to their darker, more experimental and inaccessible ways, then you’d be right. Whilst In Rainbows was a warm, organic album, lush and colourful and rich with intimacy, the first half of The King of Limbs at least is almost a polar opposite: opener Bloom in particular is twitchy and paranoid, Feral nasty and electronic, dealing solely in various shades of grey and white. It sounds like Kid A if it was produced by Burial, Amnesiac goes dub-step; arguably this owes more to Yorke’s solo effort The Eraser than any full-band release apart from perhaps some obscure Amnesiac-era b-sides. As Jarvis Cocker once sang, “this is the sound of someone losing the plot... you’re gonna like it, but not a lot.”

This isn’t to say that Radiohead have lost their touch for painstakingly crafting songs of sheer beauty. Lead single Lotus Flower is a turning point for the album, Yorke showcasing his unique vocal range as he tenderly sings of “an empty space inside”, albeit with the caveat of it also being a place “where the weeds take root.” After this the album is much softer if not mellower; Give up the Ghost is just about the first time an actual guitar is noticeable on the album and is certainly the most minimalistic track, whilst final track Separator is the first that might be considered instantly accessible – perhaps a mark of the band’s wry sense of humour that this is the album’s exit sign. However the early highlight is the painfully gorgeous piano-led Codex, with its horns and orchestration so far removed from the melody that far from being intrusive, they paint a stunning starry backdrop for the linger to gaze wide-eyed into as Yorke gives his most tender and indeed best vocal since How to Disappear Completely a decade ago.

The King of Limbs is too dark, too monochrome and too deliberately obtuse to be an instant classic to any casual music fan. It probably won’t sell many on its physical release, you won’t hear Chris Evans playing it on his breakfast show, and the band won’t be performing Morning Mr. Magpie at next year’s Brit Awards. It is however the most important band of the past twenty years once again treading into more-or-less uncharted territory, transcending the boundaries between marginalised genres such as electronica and dub-step and exposing them to the wider public eye. It was doing this with avant-garde jazz that made Kid A the most fascinating album of the last decade, and it is only because it’s such a fresh release that I am hesitant to say that those geniuses may just have done it again.