TKOL RMX 1234567

This fluidity of their eighth album becomes a virtue for this project. [Nov 2011, p.93]

It grows, fades and breathes like an album should, it provides enough singles to make it the envy of many a record, and it also demonstrates what a perfect stem the original TKOL was.

These tracks are both club and headphone worthy, insular and expansive, ephemeral and dense, lush and skeletal; their only uniting factor, Thom's voice, curling like a wraith through their intricate insistent landscapes. Captivating.

None of these remixes fall flat. For Radiohead fans, TKOL RMX 1234567 is an opportunity to see their favorite fivesome in a new light by some of the world's most clever electronic musicians.

In a way, this is overkill indeed--over 100 minutes of remixes for a 40-minute album. However, it's also fascinating to hear how this current crop of producers--spanning abstract hip-hop, house, dubstep, bass music, and experimental techno, all selected by Thom Yorke--twists, bends, adjusts, and appropriates the source material.

It expands substantially on the tangeted, capricious nature of the record that many complained about to begin with, and ultimately serves as a very compelling companion to The King of Limbs.

Despite Yorke's much-parodied manic dancing in the Lotus Flower music video, the album's cold soul does not lend itself to a carefree, fun-loving dance floor, and as such, the mutations herein are tentative, fragile things built on the backs of their producers, and limited, for the most part, in their relationship to their source material.

In the end, TKOL RMX 1234567 does a better job at delivering Radiohead's snowy ennui than its forebearer, suggesting that the band should have collaborated with these electronic purveryors from the get-go and skipped The King of Limbs altogether.

Its most successful examples retain some Radiohead DNA, but reconstituted into a new form.

It's to the remixers' own credit--and perhaps, also, to the homogenous nature of the source material--that TKOL RMX 1234567 does a fine job of highlighting each producer's own idiosyncracies.

As long as you're up for more mood and texture experiments there's plenty of interest. [Dec. 2011 p. 135]

These 19 tracks feel designed to float in a space between clear genre boundaries, somewhere purposefully undefined. [Nov 2011, p.106]

The inherent structural flaws of any given remix album also plague TKOL RMX--a lack of consistency, flow or narrative.

A far greater number of these remixes flatten out the complexity of TKOL's grooves in favor of commonplace arrangements.

Too often TKOL RMX 1234567 feels as calculated and mechanical as its soulless title.

This set intensifies the dilemma of its parent album: ostensibly unconventional music that feels all too familiar.