Anything your band can do, Radiohead can do better

ANDREW: The eighth studio album from the peerless Radiohead is here. The King of Limbs was released yesterday, a day early, to be quickly gobbled up by the cultish hordes of devotees on the intarwebs. I have long considered myself one of these obsessive cult members, perhaps to be ridiculed by Raj and others, but in my travels, I've simply never heard anyone on their level. They don't have an equal. They don't have an analog. They just consistently make music that rewards repeat listening, varying widely in influences and stylistic choices. But enough hero worship of all things Radiohead. You don't have the time.

The album is a concise 8 track, 38 minute affair, but the tracks are finessed and finely layered, giving surprising depth to an album so brief. An unbelievable opener, introducing not only the album but effectively creating a vast soundscape, "Bloom" starts the album with hypnotic piano loops, a pulsating snare drum beat, and positively jazzy bass accents. Then comes Yorke, with a slow sprawling vocal line, smoothly and slowly gliding over the restrained drums. On this album many of the tracks sound as though they would be amazing live, with space to expand, and "Bloom" is no exception. "Morning Mr. Magpie" starts with much the same rhythmic structure, although this time more attention is given to Yorke's vocals, perhaps revealing a political narrative, with "You stole it all, give it back" as a populist rallying cry in these days of economic collapse. Maybe that's a stretch, but given Yorke's activism, I wouldn't put it past them.

Sigh, "Feral". Fucking awesome. This is the track where Radiohead proves it can play this post-dubstep game with the best of them. James Blake's vocal atmospherics, or those of Will Bevan, aka Burial, come to mind to be sure. But here Yorke's vocal effects, coming in spatially from all corners of the song, are paired with that relentess pulsating beat of the album's openers, fluctuating nicely in intensity and volume, providing necessary variety. I was thinking I haven't heard variations in drumming this satisfying since Caribou's track "Brahminy Kite".

"Lotus Flower" with its accompanying video, proves to be an oddly dance-friendly track with great bass (and hand claps!), and Yorke flaunting his trademark falsetto while crooning about the empty space in his heart. Radiohead at their best.

"Codex", the sparse and melancholy track with simple piano licks against Yorke's inimitable vocals, is a glorious slow burn, reminiscent perhaps of tracks like OK Computer's "Exit Music (For A Film)". The track is a necessary respite as well from all the fast paced frenetic beats of earlier tracks on the album.

Out of nowhere, a wild acoustic guitar appears! On "Give Up The Ghost" Radiohead decides to eat Fleet Foxes and My Morning Jacket's lunches too, turning in an almost folksy track. The vocals aren't unaltered though, and some of the looping and atmospherics sound more like Bibio's lo-fi electronic jams. Anything your band can do, Radiohead can do better.

At the end of the day, I'm not ready to evaluate this album against the Radiohead canon, and I recognize the album is not perfect (too short, where are the guitars, etc.) but this album is a well-crafted gem. Radiohead's music has such an intentional feel, for lack of a better description. These guys know exactly how they want their music to sound, how they want it to be distributed, and how they want it to be performed, and I can really respect that. Please chime in, BZNZmen.

PLEASE LET THERE BE A TOUR.

JESSE: In 8th grade I basically only listened to Blur, the Foo Fighters, and OK Computer. Foo Fighters died out pretty soon thereafter, but OK Computer and Blur carried over into high school. Then OK Computer died out too, though I still appreciate it as an incredible album. I’ll throw it on every once and awhile. But that’s it. I don’t listen to Radiohead, ever, even though I have more or less all of their music. And I feel the same about most of their music, that it’s all very, very good. It’s original, it’s deep, well layered, not too straightforward, but accessible enough to appeal to millions. And they’re deserving of their praise, as always. But that doesn’t make me ever want to listen to it. In this zero sum game of life, listening to Radiohead means I’m not listening to something else. And that’s how I feel when I listen to them most of the time, be it Kid A, In Rainbows, or yesterday’s The King of Limbs. Really, OK Computer and some of their Neil Young covers are basically all I ever listen to, and that’s a rarity. Perhaps it’s their ill-fated positioning on my iPod, sandwiched between Raccoo-oo-oon and Raekwon. My tastes are just such that I’d really rather listen to Is Night People or Only Built 4 Cuban Linx at really any given time. Oh well.

But about this album specifically…it’s really an extension of how I feel about Radiohead. It’s good, but nothing’s really standing out as something that I want to listen to very much. For as much as Andrew has said that it does so many things so much better than everyone else, to me it sounds like, well, Radiohead. Actually, the part of this that sounds least like Radiohead to me is the guitar in "Morning Mr. Magpie", because it sounds like U2. And just because a song has acoustic guitar doesn’t mean it sounds anything like indie folk-rock. “Give Up the Ghost” seems less focused on the fact that there’s an acoustic guitar in there then on the vocal layering and peaking of the song via electronic effects, which works very well. But to say that they’re really doing anything on the same level as Fleet Foxes or My Morning Jacket is sort of unfounded, isn’t it? Totally different goals here, I’d say. Also, did Radiohead fire Phil Selway? I like drum samples as much as the next guy, but sheesh. I could use a little variation in my percussion. I appreciate that it’s short enough to not really have any dull moments, though. 8 average-lengthed tracks, you don’t get tired of anything (which could happen, considering the use of more repetitive beats throughout each song), and there enough turns to keep you happy within the songs, sort of. But at the same time, I sort of just wish I were listening to Boredoms instead of this.

So overall, I’ve listened through this about 2.5 times. It’s good! And it’s Radiohead. I guess it’s overall like, no matter how many new things they try to incorporate into their music, it’s still surprisingly predictable. That probably has something to do with Thom’s vocals. Because they sound pretty much the same on everything they do matter what. I think I’ll try to listen through some more of their other albums more just in attempts to like Radiohead more than I do, but I won’t count on it. Call me the Radiohead grouch to Andrew's Kanye grouch.

RAJ: "Anything your band can do, Radiohead can do better"? More like, "Radiohead can do better", am I right?

But SRSly, a few brief thoughts, since Andy and Jesse have already covered this pretty thoroughly: I'm closer to Andy than Jesse on the love-of-Radiohead spectrum (although, yes, I would generally rather listen to Raekwon), but I will say that this is the first Radiohead release since Pablo Honey that hasn't felt to me like an out-of-the-gate first-listen revelation. That has a lot to do with the very intentional decision to make this album a thoroughly mellow, low-key affair, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but certainly limits Radiohead from engaging in the kind of grand gestures that mark the very best of their work.

If there's one common thread throughout all the past Radiohead albums, it's a kind of apocalyptic bombast, a tendency towards drama and full-throated emotion - the operatic sweep of "Paranoid Android", the suffocating paranoia of "Idioteque", etc, etc, ad infinitum. The King of Limbs feels a lot more muted in that sense - "Bloom", "Codex", and "Give Up The Ghost" are gorgeous and haunting, and "Lotus Flower" has the great almost-R&B vibe that you saw on past tracks like "House of Cards", but this is masterfully-crafted prettiness in place of the soaring ambition we saw on past Radiohead efforts.

I'm not going to trash this album because there's obvious skill, care, and inspiration present in these tracks, but kind of like Jesse, I don't feel particularly compelled to revisit anything off this album except for "Lotus Flower" and maybe "Bloom" (for the record, I think "Feral" is a total misfire - an amalgam of various electronic influences that never cohere into a song or structure that's particularly interesting, kind of like "Pull/Pulk Revolving Doors" from Amnesiac). Now I'm going to go listen to the new PJ Harvey album some more.

In addition:

- Andy was totally just baiting everyone with his band references, but I will forgive him because of his deft Pokemon reference.

- What the hell kind of U2 song does "Morning Mr. Magpie" sound like, Jesse?