ALBUM REVIEW: Radiohead - The King of Limbs

(Self-released, 2011)
Review by Michael Bird
                                             
4/5

It’s hard to know where to start in assessing a Radiohead release. When you become one of the Biggest Bands Around and don’t have your singer die at a young age or disintegrate completely under the pressure, you have to put up with an unbelievable amount of scrutiny concerning every album you put out. Announcing the impending release of an album four days out is one way to avoid excess ‘what next’ wonderings from press and fans, but there are simply no free passes when you’re a Band releasing an Album as opposed to a band releasing an album, nothing goes unexamined.

For perhaps the first time since the release of Kid A, Radiohead have not, by any means, reinvented themselves. There’s nothing on The King of Limbs that the band haven’t done before, and any differences to the nearest comparison that first springs to mind for any song are in degree, not kind. ‘The Gloaming’ might be the most relevant touchstone for the first third or so of the album, which is driven largely by spastic scribble percussion and jittery bass stabs. ‘Bloom’, while an oddly straightforward title for an album opener, is by no means a comfortable listen. Along with the similarly restless ‘Little By Little’, ‘Bloom’ seems devoid of a center, as though the band were unwilling to provide enough framework for the song to start moving anywhere other than tumbling forward at the pace of (J. Greenwood’s, I would suspect) chaotic, glitch-inspired take on percussion.

Production is what saves these first few songs from coming off as cold and barren. Like ’15 Step’, the frenzied clicks and warped snares that swim around Selway’s contributions (they are there, if a little buried at times) are only glitch-inspired, not pulled apart by compression and pitch-shifting to the point where all traces of acoustic warmth are removed. Colin Greenwood’s bass also treads this line, slides and fingered strings never giving way entirely to the clipped severity of the digital bass that adorned Kid A-era Radiohead.

In many of the studio sessions for The King of Limbs, it seems that Thom Yorke may finally have come good on his oft-repeated assertion that he is tired of melody, and that beat is where the focus should be. By fourth track ‘Feral’, the album is still being pulled along by bastardised cuts of the Amen Break, never concrete enough to provide the insistence of ‘Idioteque’, but still by far the most present ingredient. Yorke’s voice becomes swathed in reverb and delay, guitars either chiming at the edge of the soundscape or pulsing through antique cabs in a manner reminiscent of In Rainbows. (A common complaint was that the album sounded like it had been recorded ‘inside a shoebox’ or ‘with a 100 year-old mic’. Where Ed O’Brien has had to abandon traditional structure and melody, he has become a master of texture).

‘Lotus Flower’ is…sexy. The first mood Radiohead touch on other than their almost standard claustrophobic adversity is a sultry one indeed. Once the song settles, ‘Lotus Flower’ showcases the first real taste of space and clarity on The King of Limbs, and the first and last instance of fragile delicacy. Halfway through the song (and halfway through the album), much of the sonic adornment falls away, Yorke croons for a change and a muted synth emotes. With all the chopped scribble and rhythmic pulse of the first half of the album, it’s easy to forget that Radiohead are capable of getting more emotion across than most of their contemporaries, and that Thom Yorke takes to Kaoss Pads and staccato voice-as-an-instrument theatrics because he’s sick of sounding like an angel, not because he can’t.

It’s almost impossible not to mention ‘Pyramid Song’ in discussing ‘Codex’, all heavy-handed piano chords and jumping into lakes. Psychedelic tape delay and sweeping phasers continually threaten to sink the song into experimental noise, but never quite do so. A brass sections makes a brief appearance, and later an orchestral flurry hints at a lush b-part to the song, but again it doesn’t happen. Some mess starts entering into the equation again, but where the first half of the album was a haze of jittery percussion, the latter half is swamped in delay and colliding tones. ‘Lotus Flower’ seems to have been intentionally placed in the middle of the album as a sharply defined peak of clarity, after the Kid A/Amnesiac/’Gloaming’ clatter of the opening third and before the more recent, jam-based flavours of ‘Give Up The Ghost’ and ‘Separator’.

Rating an album like The King of Limbs is tricky. Did Radiohead achieve what they set out to with the record? Probably yes. The intent seems to have been to pull at the edges of their more experimental cuts, consolidate and inject more humanity into the mix. The result is an album more personable than Amnesiac and more direct than the more wandering cuts on In Rainbows. Out of context, is the album an enjoyable listen? For the most part, yes. It’s unlikely ‘enjoyable on the first spin’ is high on the list of things Yorke and Co. aim for album to album, but The King of Limbs is varied, meticulously constructed and immersive, as deserving of critical attention as anything the band have put out. The peaks aren’t as noticeable as they once were, but that’s a result of Radiohead now being a mature band tugging at the undefined edges of their sound, rather than barrelling head first into and through them.