Reviews of Radiohead's The King of Limbs

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Perhaps the defining feature of The King of Limbs is that it doesn't feel like a 'big' album. 

In fact, it feels exactly the opposite.

-Sputnik Music

The King of Limbs is very much a rhythm-driven album; 

skittering, off-kilter beats underpin the majority of the songs on show.

-Ripchord

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

-AV Club

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

-Entertainment Weekly

More to the point, like Amnesiac, much of this material seems on first listen tinged with abstraction and elliptical constructions. The songs do not register as pop, or even art-pop or whatever other hyphenated monikers we could’ve rightly used to describe the bright and crisp In Rainbows.

-Popmatters

Each time I listen to The King Of Limbs, my ears are drawn to a new layer of ambience; 

a recording nuance I missed on a prior listen, a lyric that draws me in and sticks with me, a piece of electronic percussion that I didn’t notice without listening on headphones, or a hypnotic piano, rolling bass line or minimalistic guitar line. 

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

-Alternative Press

....none of the things that Radiohead spent their career dismantling could possibly substitute for the answer; although, even after several tracks with impassioned lyrical sloganeering and ambitious, studio-enhanced sonic bluster, they don’t seem to have an answer themselves. “Separator” features Yorke playfully taunting the same audience that has, yet again, been led bewildered into a wilderness.

-Tiny Mixtapes

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. 

-Paste

For the most part, though, The King of Limbs lingers in states of emotional and physical in- between-ness — blooming, diving, flirting, floating, falling. The album's most striking moment might be "Codex," an invitation to leap into the unknown that recalls classic Radiohead more than anything else here. It's just Yorke at the piano accompanied by what sounds like a very depressed EKG machine; the melody luxuriates in pillowy ache, the lyrics are at once reassuring and creepy: "Jump off the end/The water's clear and innocent." Maybe it's about a drowning, maybe it's about a swimming lesson. 

The fun is in not knowing. Taking the plunge into this band's mysteries is one of rock's true pleasures.

-Rolling Stone

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.... 

Its grandest gesture is the absence of one.- Boston Globe

From “Pablo Honey” in 1993 through “The King of Limbs,” released last week on short notice via the group’s website, the English band’s most consistent hallmark has been the restless wanderlust of a never-ending search for what’s next....These are not songs that unfold on first listen, or even necessarily on third or fourth. That’s more of a commitment than many music fans are willing to make, and fair enough — 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.-Hatford Courant

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

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.

-Popmatters (II)

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The European: How do you weigh the advantages of accumulating information against the distraction we talked about?

Carr: There’s no question that the internet offers all sorts of benefits – that is the reason why we use it so much. It is an incredibly powerful and useful technology that makes all sorts of information immediately available to us. Things that used to be impossible, hard or expensive to find are now right there. And we all know how to improve our ability to make decisions with it. But accompanying that, incredibly, is the fact that we become so intent on gathering information that we never slow down and think deeply about the information we find. We gain the ability to harvest huge amounts of data but we lose the ability to engage in contemplation, reflexion and other modes of thinking that require a large amount of attentiveness and the ability to filter out distractions and disruptions. You can’t separate the good and the bad: We gain something important but we sacrifice something important as well....

{Nicholas Carr | Informations and Contemplative Thought, European Magazine | Continue}

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Nicholas Carr's book the Shallows is fascinating as well and would be worth scooping up for everyone's week long beach sesh next month. What is lost in the age of the instant information? Is the internet changing our mental processing, the way we think? 

I believe it is. 

In the third world, for the most part, everyone's problems are tangible. Lack of food, water, shelther or the everpopular "I have malaria and this fever suuuuuucks." But in industrialized nations and especially the United States, all of our basic needs are taken care of, above and beyond their original call of duty. Take food, for instance. Food isn't really about hunger anymore, its now about taste and in its more advanced stage, health. Cardboard flavoured NutraGrieve bars prove that much of the Taste category is lost when a product graduates to the Health stage but that's neither here nor there. Corn pudding and fried apples might not be the most healthiest thing in the world but it raises morale and since most health problems start on the inside first, there is something to be said for that too, right? 

Isn't that why its called soul food?

Anyway, the point I'm jonesing for here in the library (a beautiful 70 degrees & flourescent) is that our most basic needs in life have now been given higher degrees of meaning beyond their original purpose. Since all our bodily concerns are taken care of, we graduated into a stage where all our problems and worries in the world are therefore internalized. And the speed of the internet connectivity ramps that up to a manic pace. America is one of the few nations in the world where people have to create tragedies in order to feel alive. It's not like our existence is threatened on a day to day basis. Maybe in South Florida though, where monster Burmese pythons, originally decaged by the wrath of Hurricane Andrew in 1993, slinked into the lush Everglades and eventually started making babies with another scaley escapee on the run. Now these snakes are a classified invasive species. The Supreme Court passed a motion to ban the importing of these creatures from overseas, beginning this year. You know why? Because these snakes are fearless. They've been honing their survival chops on alligators ever since they've learned to crawl and now, with a confidence as big as their appetite, they're creeping back out of the swamp with a vengence and having their way with the Miami-Dade area, wolfing down sleeping babies and plucking granddads off their golf carts. For fun. 

Surely, I jest but seriously, National Geographic just did an article about how raccoon and opossum sightings, based on a ten year average, are down 99% (!!!) in some places. These snakes are eating on everything in sight, therefore doubling their all time records for caloric intake and inevitably prompting them to twice their average size in a few years.... 

Did you see how easy that was? Something was just created out of no nothing. That's exactly what happens when folks plug up online and into their social networks and begin extrapolating all kinds of dramatic conclusions from a limited amount of information. Thus bringing a heap of unnecessary stress into the world. I'm absolutely guilty of it but I'm also aware its all bullshit and isn't that right there the first step towards solving the problem? All I'm saying is, everyone needs to go scuba diving more often. It's meditative, active, it can be colourful, computers don't work and most importantly, human beings are no longer the apex predator. Contrary to popular belief, fear can be a great thing. It heightens the senses, increases overall awareness and stimulates the heart. Shazam. Who would have thought snakes and sharks would be such good teachers of humility? The dead, that's who. Think about that

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The Cramps-Primitive

San Tze Gol?

  

Mums

SWAG pt.II

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(xxxtra from director Romain Gavras}

SWAG

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Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

-Dr. Carl Sagan

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{Cosmic Breath | Continue}