The King of Limbs

A fans-pleasing eighth album from Britain's most consistently brilliant band.

Right now I'm pretty content with digging The King of Limbs as I'd dig any new record: enjoying the personality that comes from the record itself and not the name behind it. And guess what? Radiohead makes good music. As if you had any doubt.

Where In Rainbows was mellow but brisk - an album that felt on its way somewhere - these songs are eerie and insidious, creeping like shadows - and, often because of the haunting voice of Thom Yorke, the occasional chill.

Still, swirling in there with Yorke's apocalyptic surrealisms and his band's tricky rhythms, there's a beating heart that feels almost animal. If The King of Limbs doesn't feel alive to you at first, give it some time to wake up.

As with anything that's trying to do something bigger and better, lessons of that magnitude can take more time to sink in, definitely longer than the handful of hours we've had to absorb what The King of Limbs might be all about. In that sense, the jury is still out on The King of Limbs and that's because there's always something more to Radiohead.

Almost two decades later, and they prove why everyone continues to keep tabs and standards for not only the band, but everyone around trying to live up to the influence.

The material here is as strong as we've come to expect from this band, but its pleasures aren't nearly as surface-level as even Kid A's. The best way to judge The King of Limbs in the long run may simply be to hope someone spurs Radiohead on in this direction.

As is Radiohead's custom, The King Of Limbs hasn't been designed for immediate comprehension or acceptance.

There's just incredible depth to The King Of Limbs, and if you're impatient, you'll miss it.

It's been a long time since Radiohead made records with an eye toward anything more than satisfying the band's own creative impulses, if it ever did. Those who are prepared to stick it out, though, may well find The King of Limbs worth the wait.

Radiohead's ambitions are so modest that it's hard to tell whether this is just creative throat clearing or the quieter path they've settled for. If it's the latter, well, Radiohead sound calmer and more content than ever. [May 2011, p.106]

"Feral," "Codex" and "Giving Up The Ghost" finally win me over. [Apr 2011, p.62]

The King of Limbs passes like a breeze, and has you skipping back to the start as soon as the final track fades out. [May 2011, p.90]

Though King Of Limbs may be the band's simplest and most inaccessible album to date, the tone and mood created by the chaotic start and smooth finish makes it an exciting work.

Within Radiohead's oeuvre, TKOL most closely resembles Kid A and Amnesiac, the double-headed phoenix that rose out the ashes of the band's turn-of-the-century identity crisis. The only thing missing this time around is, well, the identity crisis.

The brevity is a disappointment and the songs at times feel like B-sides of something more un-inked, but Radiohead are (and definitively always will be) musicians capable of emotion at the rawest base and somehow binding it to melody and lyric-forever haunting and influencing future generations too numerous to count or imagine.

Listening to it, you're reminded that Radiohead are the only band of their size and status that seem driven by an impulse to twist their music into different shapes.

For these guys, disappearing completely and disappearing into the groove are pretty much the same thing.

The King of Limbs sounds like the bastard offspring of dubstep and Nico Muhly, the brilliant composer whose string and choral arrangements inhabit the open spaces between contemporary classical and art-rock.

King Of Limbs is a subtle, muti-layered affair - surprisingly low-key in places, and it certainly won't win back any fans who checked out in the late '90s.

Okay, so how do they still fare? With The King of Limbs, reasonably well.

Radiohead's eighth record, The King of Limbs, represents a marked attempt to create a considered and cohesive unit of music that nonetheless sits somewhere outside of the spectrum of their previous full-length discography.

The King of Limbs demands some deep immersion for comprehension, just as a traveler from a foreign land must lose himself in the culture to understand where they are.

Maybe more context, and a little more heart, will make The King of Limbs feel less unreal.

Masters of mood that they are, Radiohead digitally weave stuttering, glitchy loops of drums and guitars with real instruments, Thom Yorke's mournful moan and keening falsetto acting as a binding agent, creating an alluringly dour atmosphere.

The truth is, however much or little you enjoy them, Radiohead are one of the few mainstream bands who try not to retrace their steps.

The King Of Limbs, named after a famous oak in the Savernake forest near the studio where In Rainbows was made, is good but not great.

No, The King of Limbs is not a world-beating album, and it was never meant to be; it's an album about Radiohead trying to iron out their own creases and fix their own flaws, and judged on those terms, it's another success.

The King of Limbs finds Yorke and company preparing to forge a new path while taking a pensive look at what has gone before.

Last time around, on 2007's In Rainbows, the music was just as interesting as all of the hoopla surrounding the album's impromptu, pay-what-you-will release. The King of Limbs cannot boast the same.

Such moments of unnerving beauty make The King of Limbs, despite its complete lack of guitar-rock grandeur, worth revisiting time and again.

Interestingly, the very qualities that make this a subpar Radiohead album are what make it their most experimental record yet. But this is also Radiohead elliptically circling back on themselves in dramatic form.