THE KING OF LIMBS

Thom Yorke is a nihilist. He finds no rational meaning in living and all this struggling. His biggest passion is music, though he loves every form of art. He loves Pink Floyd, Joy Division, Talking Heads. He gets so much inspiration from rock music. So he forms a Brit-pop band. They release "Pablo Honey" and "The Bends". They become the next big thing. In this period of time, Thom Yorke and the guys are always discovering new arts and music to widen up their inspiration and their music. Radiohead had always been a band that cares a lot about production of an album. With the help of great production, they achieve this classic album, "OK Computer". It's an album to stand the test of time easily to become a timeless state of art. But Radiohead is a band to challenge their music and creativity. They show this to everyone by recording "Kid A" and "Amnesiac". They continue with "Hail to the Thief" and "In Rainbows", as most of them start having families of their own and being grown-ups rather to being selfish weird life-forms called rock stars.

Radiohead is one of the most popular rock bands of today. There is this massive fan base, which Radiohead will never be able to fulfil their expectations. They're not meaning to anyway. They are just doing their thing, ignoring the fans screaming through their windows, "Give us another OK Computer!" People listen to them with laptop speakers and still expect a wonderful journey. That's not a surprise that most of the mainstream fans don't like this album. And most of Radiohead's fans are the mainstream fans. So globally, it's easy to say this album is tried to be murdered by the MP3 generation. What some fans are not seeing is there are so many to hear on this album, we're talking about minimalist melodies building and building up. You need quality earphones, and at least 320 kbps MP3's to enjoy most of the stuff on the album.

Nowadays, Thom Yorke is into a lot of electronic music, a lot of bands and music I've never heard of. He has grown a love for minimalist electronic music. Weird shit. Radiohead is still a rock band though, so these ideas are hard to put into their music. And when they do, we get this. Most of the fans don't see this album as another Radiohead masterpiece. They have given up on loving it. The situation is not so bad though. Some fans have found it very original and capturing. I feel like I'm in the middle. I've forced myself to be captured by this album, and I have managed to love the journey. But that doesn't mean it's a capturing album. It's just me, trying harder and harder. I've watched the Live from the Basement sessions 3 times. Not much surprises me anymore while listening to The King of Limbs. I believe this one will not make it to be a timeless album. And I'm not one of those who say "Radiohead should be more rock". I love Kid A from start to end. I just feel like they threw 10 stones but only 5 of them hit the spot. But that does not mean that it's a bad album, as it's definitely not.

Time to praise the album up. It seems impossible to me to handle such minimalist melodies building up in a such beautiful manner, as these guys are able to. The lyrics are "minimalist" poems, each line having only 3 or 4 words. This style is a new thing for me, therefore I'll call it totally original. I'm blown away by the fact how great musicians they are. Some people see Radiohead as a dictatorship of Thom Yorke. But I'm pretty sure that they all just agree whole heartedly that they want to make some revolutionary music, and Thom Yorke's weird ways to make music combined with the other guys like Jonny Greenwood playing his guitar and all his stuff that I can't even name in his original style, with the hypnotic powerful bass playing by Colin Greenwood, with all the back vocals and other helpful backing and with all the talent and intelligence of Ed O'Brien, with their new two drummer style creating very original and powerful rhythms is the way they want to go to create the revolutionary music that they dream of. It's true that Thom Yorke now does most of the work of Radiohead, but Radiohead wouldn't be the same without any of the other musicians' help.

Starting with the song "Bloom", "Morning Mr Magpie" and then "Feral" we witness a complex music filled with a weird form of psychedelia. While the first 4 songs sound similar to each other to my ear, that's only the first half of it. With "Lotus Flower" we remember its strangely wonderful video clip and start to dance like Thom Yorke. I didn't though. Because I'm a serious reviewer. When we start listening to "Codex" we finally reach a beautiful Thom Yorke ballad. It's a little bit different due to the album's general style, but it's really beautifully melancholic in its own way. "Give Up The Ghost" is another wonderful example of the new Thom Yorke style, lead by an acoustic guitar. With the last song "Seperator" closing up similar to the style of the first half, we finish our fairly short journey. I recommend listening to the songs that weren't included on the album but they have found their ways to be listened to. I loved "The Daily Mail" more than anything on the actual album. "The Butcher" is another killer track. "The Staircase" wouldn't sound out of place on the album.

What we hear on this album is artisticly and intellectually very successful. As I still don't think this is an effort that will be able to make history, I wish the fans would pay more attention to this hard worked journey. It's psychedelic, it's electronic, it's rock. It's a hypnotic wave of Thom Yorke's truely beautiful voice mixed with all the wonderful instrumentation.