The King of Limbs: Periphery to the Epic

The King of Limbs
(TBD)

The King of Limbs is a tightly knit, 37-­minute glimpse. It’s a periphery album, immaculately conceived from its own subconscious. The eight songs aren’t so much songs as they are movements of sound over beats. It’s not an epic, but Radiohead weren’t trying to make the epic here. They’ve done that. The King of Limbs is merely a look through an old brass spyglass, the kind that used to discover new continents. Driving meters and time signatures—odd but on—run the album through a muffled prism lens. It’s dampened, longing, and spatial. Radiohead are playing with sonics, arrangements, production, and tonal canopies that fold in and out of each other. As a collection of music, it resembles Thom Yorke’s solo album The Eraser.

King‘s second song, “Morning Mr. Magpie,” is the highlight. Chunky, clean rhythmic guitar and chopped-up drums lead, build, then drop out. Swells of ambient noise gather at the forefront as Yorke sings a Beatles-type “Glass Onion” refrain, “Mr. Magpie/How are we today?” It’s simultaneously beautiful, dark, and uplifting, like so much Radiohead is. Then into song three, “Little by Little,” which is again guitar- and beat-driven. Yorke’s voice becomes more an instrument here, the words less intelligible. You don’t need to know what he’s saying to know it’s poignant, smart, and somewhat sad, but still filled with hope. The 16th beats and fingerpicked guitar give way to electronic pulse and Yorke’s falsetto drifting plaints. “Give Up the Ghost” is a somber, alternately tuned, acoustic procession with fanning string sounds. Vocals trail off and evolve into effected digitized loops and tides. Radiohead specialize in digitizing sounds until they seemingly become aqueous.

Words and lyrics in The King of Limbs aren’t grandiose with meaning. It’s an ambiguous story about a Leader of the Trees. Vocally, Yorke does more mouthing fragments of sound than singing actual words, fitting them into the music’s imagery. His thoughts and schemes seem to slide directly from his subconscious, painting a pathos of saints with a brush made of piranha teeth. In “Lotus Flower,” he sings, “I will sneak myself into your pocket/Invisible/Do what you want/Do what you want/I will sink and I will disappear/I will slip into the groove and cut me up/And cut me up.” Listeners can ascribe their own meaning or let it disappear—it’s up to them. The King of Limbs isn’t the greatest album of all time. Radiohead have already released that, like three times. I, for one, am happy with this closer look through the trees.