Radiohead “King of Limbs” (XL Records)
I’ll be the first to admit that Radiohead is not my favorite band. When they first “struck it big” with the song “Creep”, I was moderately impressed but never quite saw that same spark others saw in them. I thought that “Paranoid Android” was a good song and an even better animated music video. I also really liked the song “High and Dry”. Otherwise, my interest in Radiohead was very low. I thought that would kind of obviously lead to my immediate trashing of this album, which is sometimes a fun way to blow off some steam. I was wrong. This album is not entirely awful. But so we can save ourselves all the drama before the end of this review let me fast forward and tell you- SPOILERS ALERT: This album does not make a fan out of me.
King of Limbs is eight somewhat upbeat, mostly offbeat and rather fun songs that are all around 5 minutes in length, give or take. The first song opens with this funky piano dangling sound and an obvious snare roll to the beat of a different drummer. The second song has a weird cell phone riff going throughout it, which sounds clever at first but just overall becomes annoying. In the third song I swear he’s singing “Karma Police” and the fourth song is this sort of house dance number without a lot of vocals but with more of an electronic sound and a drum machine.
What struck me most about this album is not only the style of the songs but how they are composed. Musically, this is a very beautiful piece of art called music. My biggest flaw with this album is simply the vocals. I can do without these whiny, still teenage sounding fits of whatever he might be singing about now. I bet Thom Yorke could sing about the best day of his life or cover the freaking Spice Girls and make it sound like he wants to kill himself. If I could get a copy of this album without the vocals it’d be perfect for me. These nasally vocals just seem to ruin it for me.
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