Radiohead

So Thom Yorke and company have finally released the new Radiohead album. Depending on who you ask, The King of Limbs is either “an understated masterpiece” or “the biggest turd since Pablo Honey.”Also, fans and critics alike have already rushed to make judgments and pronouncements about the album, despite the fact that it’s only been available for public consumption for about 24 hours now.

I’m not going to “review” the album here, because taste is subjective and I truthfully don’t know quite what I think of it yet. The King of Limbs is good, don’t get me wrong, but whereas In Rainbows was an amalgamation of the band’s manifold strengths–pulsating electronic beats, undulating guitars, soaring synths, lonely piano, tightly-constructed songs containing seemingly  elements that fit together naturally and strangely like soggy puzzle pieces–this album seems to be hiding underneath the covers, shouting muffled ambient noises at a darkened, empty room. The King of Limbs the most abstract thing the band has done since Amnesiac, and as someone who loves Amnesiac, I’m intrigued by its mysteries.

That said, the timing of this release was inevitably going to be unfavorable, which is why I suspect the band announced its imminent release swiftly and suddenly. See, just about every music publication made a “Best of the 2000s” list back in 2010, and Kid A was pretty unanimously selected as the greatest album of the decade. Listeners were reminded of Radiohead’s peak levels of greatness; all that talk about its “masterful combination of rock and electronica” and “uneasy relationship with the technology that would define the following ten years” raised the cult of expectations for the next Radiohead album to obviously unrealistic heights.

The musical landscape onto which Kid A appeared is all but extinct in 2011. There will never be an album–by Radiohead or otherwise–with the same kind of techno-industrial impact; nothing will sound as new and menacing as “Everything In Its Right Place,” because we no longer live in a world where the Rise Of The Machines peeks above the distant horizon–that Rise has risen, and we’re now fully immersed in the kind of world where, thanks to the internet, we are “allowed everything all of the time,” as Yorke predicted on “Idioteque.” Twitter and Tumblr are our “unborn chicken voices,” shooting across cyberspace “at a thousand feet per second.”

All of which is not to say that The King of Limbs is “devoid of messages about society” or “navel-gazing instead of outward-looking.” This is Radiohead; they always have something to say about all of us. But when you listen to this new album, resist the temptation to “expect something grandiloquent.” I’ve only given the record a couple spins so far, but it’s clear that this is meant to be an immersive, not instructive, listening experience.