Album Review

Radiohead – The King Of Limbs

• 24th Feb 2011

With The Suburbs taking every album gong going, Win Butler of Arcade Fire looked poised to take the crown of Best Band in the World from the top of Thom Yorke’s head. But knowing Radiohead, it was never going to be an easy battle. And so, on Valentines day we were given the most beautiful news that could be broken, Radiohead have a new album out, excellent! When’s it out? Saturday. Ingenius! But apparently that was all just a rouse, and being the charming romantics that they are, they gave it out on Friday instead, a nice bit of chaos for the weekend papers to deal with then. The King of Limbs then, the 8th long-player from the legendary Oxford band, and only 8 tracks to show for it, had better be a blighter then.

In 2007 Radiohead re-invented themselves with In Rainbows it was stripped down, clean and beautiful in places. The King of Limbs then, is no In Rainbows, but that’s not a bad thing at all. Every track of TKOL has the characteristics of In Rainbows, but here we have a band following as many rules as Dr House. There’s no big guitars, no screaming solos but there is 38 minutes of pure, unadulterated beauty. Up first we have Bloom, pianos, electronics, drums they’re all here, but it is not until one minute in that these puzzle pieces fit together. Thom Yorke’s voice puts everything in it’s right place (Sorry) reverb-ing in and out, as violins flutter around and melodies fly about, overall creating a contained but quite reflexive opening track. The natural feel of Bloom goes on to set the tone for the rest of the The King of Limbs, named after a 1,000 year old oak tree in Wiltshire, here we have a record that clearly has taken inspiration from the environment. Not in an Al Gore let’s go and live in wooden huts and drive cars that run on chip oil way, but in a way that takes the beauty of the environment and transports it into an album. Although there are drum machines, and there are synthesizers here too, there’s is also a very organic sound. Bird song appears throughout the record and the reverb on Yorke’s voice makes you think it had been recorded from the woods of the King itself; even the album artwork is inspired from Northern European fairy tales of forests and woods.

The first single to come from TKOL is track 5 Lotus Flower, the video features Yorke throwing some shapes that I am extremely jealous of, and it’s been garnering some serious attention on the web, [link] being the best thing to come from it so far. In regard to the song, it’s probably the most structured on the entire record, although that’s not saying it’s going to be getting up in the charts any time soon. Again, the impact of nature shows it’s face ‘Slowly we unfurl. Like lotus flowers’. I think that line generally embodies the entire album, The King of Limbs is Radiohead becoming a lotus flower, they’ve given themselves complete creative freedom and unfurled themselves, into something elegant, poignant and beautifully subtle. Following Lotus Flower is Codex and in my opinion one of Radiohead’s greatest musical feats to date. It is not cluttered, there is no heavy editing, all we have is a piano and a voice, and the same emotion in any rendition of Karma Police or Street Spirit, as well as the incredible simplicity of Reckoner, and where that track is now seen as the stand out from In Rainbows, Codex will be the very same for The King of Limbs. But all we can do now is wait, what will become of TKOL? It could well be seen as an E.P of abstract work to be looked at with one eye shut and a tilt of the head, or possibly one of the most beautiful bodies of work to happen since the start of the century.