Send "Radiohead " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Now that the music on In Rainbows has had four years to outshine its launch mechanism, it's easy to forget that the album originally came bundled with an honest attempt to solve a business problem. The pay-what you-think-is-fair system wasn't just Radiohead being magnanimous, it was using their popularity and their newly won independence to ask what might have been the single most important question facing a shaken music industry: What is an album in the download era actually worth to fans?Announced on Monday of last week and then chucked out to rabid fans like flank steak a day ahead of schedule, the band's eighth album dispenses with the honesty-box pricing model but still finds them using their influence to interrogate the terms around how we consume and relate to music. Containing a slight eight tracks across 37 minutes, The King of Limbs is Radiohead's first album to clock in under the 40-minute mark, falling into that limbo between a modern full-length and an EP. What's more, it feels like it stops short intentionally, almost confrontationally, as if Radiohead are trying to ask a new kind of question about their music. "None of us want to get into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again," Thom Yorke told The Believer in August 2009. "It's just become a real drag. It worked with In Rainbows because we had a real fixed idea about where we were going. But we've all said that we can't possibly dive into that again. It'll kill us." This wouldn't be the first time that a member of Radiohead publicly fantasized about disowning the album format, but it might have been the most convincing. How better to unburden themselves of the stress of making more records in the mold of The Bends, OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesiac, and In Rainbows than by simply changing the terms of their engagement? Radiohead's eighth record, The King of Limbs, represents a marked attempt to create a considered and cohesive unit of music that nonetheless sits somewhere outside of the spectrum of their previous full-length discography. And that's not to say that it doesn't ripple with the dazzling sonics or scenery that have become the band's stock in trade, but just that, unlike so many of their milestones, there's no abiding sense of a band defying all expectations in order to establish new precedents....full text |
| Popmatters |
| Much of the almost instantaneous reaction to The King of Limbs has come with the caveat that any perspective on Radiohead’s new album at this point is unreliable and subject to change, which is fair enough considering that this latest offering is one that will take its time to fully reveal everything that’s happening on it. Or, as Chuck Klosterman put in a tweet, “I’m sure Radiohead is depressed about these reviews, since they obviously make albums for people to listen to once at 9:20 am on a laptop.” Springing not one, but two surprises on the listening public by announcing the existence and release of The King of Limbs early last week, then sneaking it out online a day earlier than scheduled this past weekend, Radiohead caught everyone off guard and forced critics around the globe into rendering judgment before they were ready—talk about democratizing the marketplace, since music scribes and industry insiders had to wait their turn along with fans, casual and diehard alike, to hear The King of Limbs, suggesting that no one has any more insight on or claim to the album that anyone else. In lieu of business as usual, they’ve figured out how to focus on the music and leave the work of hyping ‘em up to everyone else, mastering the art of being popular in spite of themselves. So Radiohead may or may not be the best or biggest band in the world, but it’s safe to say that it’s definitely the most enigmatic act around. Radiohead’s paradoxical nature and contrarian attitude might have even more to say about the band’s music and its reception than it does the group’s ingeniously back-asswards (anti-)media campaigns, which continue to rewrite the book on publicity in the digital age precisely by eschewing and disdaining self-promotion. The irony of the situation is that the less of a fuss Radiohead makes about itself, the more of a cultural phenomenon each and every one of its albums becomes, so much so that it can get a very large and very broad audience to pay attention to music that’s more or less devoid of any hooks or gimmicks (marketing aside) to sell it. Put another way, there’s no way any other band could release something as dense, complex, and abstract as The King of Limbs to as much hubbub, fanfare, and warm adoration—Thom Yorke himself might as well be describing Radiohead’s justified artistic hubris when he sneers, “You’ve got some nerve,” on “Morning Mr. Magpie”....full text |
| Starpulse |
| Released a day before it was officially supposed to street, Radiohead and brainchild Thom Yorke have found another way to essentially dupe the masses with their latest, and eighth, studio long player, the King of Limbs. Perhaps Radiohead is just having fun with their followers with the way they have gone about releasing recent records (see the ‘pay what you want’ release of 2007’s In Rainbows), or perhaps Yorke and his band of merry men are just bored, but either way, Radiohead seems to have again pushed the envelope when it comes to the art of releasing albums. The King of Limbs is a challenging listen initially, and in terms of sound, it aligns itself closer to In Rainbows than any other of the bands prior releases, and as a note to you old school Radiohead revivalists looking for something in the vein of the Bends or OK Computer, you’re going to have to wait, at least for now. It’s understandable that Radiohead fans will want to dive into the King of Limbs head first looking to devour the bands first new material in three years, it should be stated that one need be patient with this record. This isn’t anything close to easy-listening. “Bloom” begins the affair, immediately bringing to the forefront the albums penchant for mounting layers of sound through building pulses and throbs, a characteristic of the King of Limbs that lingers throughout most every track. The album tends to err on the mysteriously dreary and opaque side of things (“Morning Mr. Magpie,” “Codex”), but if you pay close enough attention, there are a pop moment or two to be had (“Little By Little”). The King of Limbs may not be better than the amped up, synthesized single “Lotus Flower,” but the jangly; minimalist “Give Up the Ghost” comes close. Either way, both tracks are not to be missed....full text |
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