The King of Limbs by Radiohead
The King of Limbs is the eighth studio album by English rock band Radiohead, produced by Nigel Godrich. It was self-released on 18 February 2011 as a download in MP3 and WAV formats, followed by physical CD and 12" vinyl releases on 28 March, a wider digital release via AWAL, and a special "newspaper" edition on 9 May 2011. The physical editions were released through the band's Ticker Tape imprint on XL in the United Kingdom, TBD in the United States, and Hostess Entertainment in Japan. Following the painstaking recording and relatively conventional rock instrumentation of In Rainbows, Radiohead employed a more spontaneous process to develop The King of Limbs, sampling their own recordings with turntablist techniques inspired by DJing. The band provided little information on the album, not even a track listing, before its release, and did not discuss it in detail until nearly eight months later. Singer Thom Yorke described it as an expression of "physical movements" and "wildness"; the title King of Limbs possibly refers to an oak tree in Wiltshire's Savernake Forest, thought to be 1,000 years old. The King of Limbs has the shortest running time and track listing of any Radiohead album. As with 2000's Kid A, no singles were released, though a music video was released for the track "Lotus Flower". It received mostly positive reviews from critics, though opinion was more divided than for In Rainbows. The King of Limbs was nominated for five categories in the 54th Grammy Awards, including Best Alternative Music Album, and was named one of the best albums of 2011 by several music journals. It charted in the top ten in several countries and became a bestseller on vinyl. The album was followed by the release of a remix album, TKOL RMX 1234567, and a live video, The King of Limbs – From the Basement.
At the Reading Festival in the summer of 2009, Radiohead gave the people what they wanted. The group’s set began with “Creep”, the song that had nearly made Radiohead one-hit wonders, released on a debut album the band members had all but disavowed. The next 22 songs ran like a greatest-hits collage, as the band moved from the rock atmospherics of <i>The Bends</i> to the electronic abstractions of <i>Kid A</i>, from the aggressive polemics of <i>Hail to the Thief</i> to the delicate swells of <i>In Rainbows</i>. The performance felt like career capstone for a group frequently cited as one of the most important in rock. “It was kind of like, ‘Well, that’s that; don’t need to go there again now,’” singer Thom Yorke remembered a few years later. “So there was a lot of... ‘Well, OK, if we are gonna carry on, we need to do it for a new set of reasons.’” This restlessness was a standard refrain for Radiohead, of course; this is a band that’s spent years toggling between sounds and styles. But the sessions the group members started that summer with long-time producer Nigel Godrich proved especially fraught as they searched for the next direction. Though Yorke had a few elliptical strummers in process, they weren’t quite working for his bandmates. So they took the tapes and dumped them into digital files, which they began to dig through like hip-hop producers, looking for little bits they could loop in order to build something bigger. “You had to simplify what you were doing,” guitarist Ed O’Brien remembered. “You couldn’t do loads of ideas.” Slowly and painstakingly, then, they amassed <i>The King of Limbs</i>, featuring eight tracks that asked, once again, what it meant to be Radiohead at all. The big thematic ideas of Radiohead’s albums yield to a vague sense of displacement on <i>The King of Limbs</i>—a feeling of planned obsolescence for ordinary people. Yorke’s words hang as drapery over the tightly wound rhythms of opener “Bloom”, in which icy electronics linger in the distance like spectres. He swivels inside of the percolating bass and drums of “Lotus Flower”, his falsetto filling the space between the beats with pure longing. Meanwhile, “Morning Mr. Magpie” buckles and jerks like Afrobeat, reduced to the scale of a rock band fretting for the future. There are more straightforward moments here, especially the piano ache of “Codex”, but the overriding feeling of <i>The King of Limbs</i> is one of willful transition, of the band members recognising that their venerated past is only useful as a springboard into a future they were very much trying to stake. “If you think this is over,” Yorke sings over chiming guitars and skittering bits at the end, “then you’re wrong.” This is Radiohead, once again, pushing for the vanguard.
