Radiohead: The King of Limbs

The King of Limbs

Best song: Bloom

Worst song: possibly Little By Little

Overall grade: 4

Radiohead are on hiatus. That is a sad statement but an undeniably true one, and as of October 2013, I have no idea whether it’s temporary or permanent. The hiatus commenced immediately following this album – I guess Thom felt like he’d said all he could say with the band, for now. But the question is, did he start to feel that after being done with this album, planning to leave it as his final statement, or did it happen during this album, feeling that it wasn’t going as well as their previous stuff had?

This album’s mostly built on mood. Radiohead have always been pretty minimalist but here there’s less substance than ever before, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. An example of it working well is the opener ‘Bloom’, which has a disorientating electronic rhythm driving it and vocals that wouldn’t sound out of place in a haunted house. ‘Morning Mr Magpie’ isn’t quite as successful, though. I’m not saying there isn’t clever stuff going on in the song – there is – but the band seem to think that ‘Hey, look at this weird sound we can make!’ is a fair substitute for melody, and it’s just not enough. The album isn’t even saved by good track positioning of a progression of moods – everything seems randomly arranged, like the ‘this is an album’ part of things was put second to ‘these are some noises’.

On balance, the biggest problem with this album is that Radiohead have moved solely into ‘interesting’ and too far away from ‘memorable’ or ‘emotional’, two qualities that they’ve never lacked before. I know that every song starts with a different electronic beat that I appreciate at the time, but ask me to recall any of them after the album’s finished and I just can’t.

So I can only be reliable by writing this literally while listening to it, which I am. And I can say that ‘Lotus Flower’ is actually a good song, with a very creepy atmosphere and a kind of separation between its different layers, with breezy vocals used more for effect than to carry the song. I’m also going to highlight ‘Codex’, which doesn’t fit in with the rest of the album at all, and, in fact, you can pretty much ignore everything else I’ve said when thinking about this song, a powerful piano-led ode that belongs in that moment of a movie when the main character has lost all hope, and pretty much has no electronics in sight. The next song, ‘Give Up The Ghost’, is a counterpart on the acoustic guitar but less successful, similarly pretty but lacking in any real meaning like some of the earlier songs.

None of these songs are actually bad, and to say this is a bad album from Radiohead would be a lie. But to say it’s a good album would also be a lie. It’s a pretty low 4 because, although there are songs worthy of this band name, with quite a few of the songs, I really have nothing to say. They’re empty shells of Radiohead songs. I listen to them, and I don’t feel a thing.

I really hope Radiohead get back together at some point. Not because I want to see them live – although I do, more than almost anyone – but because I think they’re capable of a much better swansong than this, and more importantly, they deserve one.