When a couple of months ago Tom Yorke posted on his facebook wall the fact that he liked the music of CAN (Future Days is my personal favorite one) not only has he given us a hint as to the direction of the focus of Radiohead's new arrangements, but perhaps he also meant to ask us to look at the length of their new album from a perspective. And we should because The King Of Limbs listening experience is not about the length of duration but it's all about the depth of expression. Radiohead's new music and lyrics keep on growing within us in many hidden ways.



So now that one of the most and longest awaited albums is here, what can be said about it? The melodic beauty becomes less important and the repetitive layers from the background of Radiohead's past and from the final minute of many songs of In Rainbows come forth and take over the center stage. The atmosphere of The King Of Limbs should not surprise anyone because it sounds like a natural progression of the music of In Rainbows and The Eraser, Thom Yorke's amazing solo album (make sure to listen to And It Rained All Night and Harrowdown Hill for a while, if you are not hooked on them yet). Lyrically, I would dare to state that we have received a concept album from Thom Yorke. Not that he had been beating around the bushes in the past but this time 'the artist, the judged' reveals the depths of his own being to us in quite overwhelming and fully committed way. He points us (man upon a stick) into the direction of a poem called Sailing To Byzantium by William Butler Yeats who is proposing the idea of oneness connecting the immortality of human spirit and art. So what is the conceptual statement of Thom Yorke's latest creation? One liners are out of the question but here is what I read between his words (coming from Thom's mind):



Sometimes you need to breathe deeply to let the tsunami waves of the spiritual ocean in and out of you. I see your spirit behind your eyes, but unfortunately we are as rare among humans as magpies among animals in being able to perceive and to recognize our own true selves. God knows I am. And little by little we both know that you know, but are we true suckers for all things spiritual or just real posers? We, flowers of lotus, the symbol of the sun, of creation and rebirth; why do we shine with exterior motives, which only bring us emptiness and fool us by our own blown egos? Let us withdraw and leave most of our stimuli behind us and focus on what is inside and real. But wait... i can't really feel you anymore... stripped by the tsunami waves of the spiritual ocean.



Bloom spreads its wings all around us and what a song it is. Listening to it feels to me like I could be standing in my own hallway hearing Rapoon's Recurring Dream Circle or Kirghiz Light playing in my room and the sounds of one of Radiohead's ballads coming out of my wife's room (she constantly listens to them). I can almost bet that Thom shares my love of repetitive experimental sound. That happens to be a dangerous addictive territory in which your brain, when hooked, starts repelling melodies. Bloom ((next to Lotus Flower) is probably the most complex sound texture of The King Of Limbs. It is eerie, powerful and intoxicating. Those years are over but I can only imagine the depth of trips this song could induce if taken with substances. This is ambient, experimental. industrial, folk and choir music coming to us all together. An amazing achievement.



Morning Mr Magpie is another extreme grower. It has the most in common with The Eraser, but its layers are more complex and developed. First time I listened to this album I completely skipped over this one, and now I can see that I start liking it more and more, little by little, but that's the title of the next song.



If a band without any financial needs places eight songs on an album following their earlier release by almost four years, and on top of it they happen to be Radiohead with their incredibly creative and ground breaking achievement of portfolio, I will listen closely to their every song. Little By Little might have been the one alluding me the longest, and I am beginning to wonder if perhaps this one is by crook, Thom is such a tease and we are such a flirt...



Feral sounds like a drum beat applied over textures of one of the better :Zoviet France: albums (What Is Not True; Look Into Me; Just An Illusion; Shadow The Thief Of Sun; Mort Aux Vaches Feedback; and Shouting At The Ground are my personal favorites). The later part has this ZF feel to it and it creates quite an atmospheric background to very rare drum solo.



Lotus Flower is the most powerful and intense song of this album, because of its unique contradictory expression. It is lyrically the darkest, most complex and revealing but melodically it is a nice simple cheerful song, and with such easy going happy-go-lucky voice Thom delivers the song's gloomy content. The simple melody of Lotus Flower comes with all toppings needed to fit this album. What an amazing final cut and how much it adds to this album. The layers here are spectacular: random hands clapping, dissonant textures, the sound of small rocks shaking, delay and echo effect, voice harmony sampled and distorted beyond recognition, fractured rhythm coming and going in and out of focus, the constant movement of the focus itself, and (if that was not enough) a synthesizer sound imitating the sound of some baby animal evoking our emotional reaction. Seriously, as in Bloom, we have to acknowledge the magnitude of this texture. There is some similarity to Jigsaw Falling Into Place in terms of melody line, tempo and energy but a lot of music has been replaced by a wall of looping sound full of distortion and vibration. We realize that we no longer listen to Radiohead only with our ears, but it feels like we are breathing this texture in and our nervous system certainly participates in our listening experience to a much greater degree as well.



Codex is today my favorite song of this amazing album (tomorrow it could be Bloom, Lotus Flower, or Give Up The Ghost). It has this minimalist Videotape feel to it. The introduction, the ambient layer, the distortion, and the gradual growth are all so hauntingly atmospheric, like a journey to the center of beauty. Someone is trying to dissect beauty into its smallest, gentlest aspects and is successful in reaching into the center of my soul.



Give Up The Ghost is as much about the music as it is about the space the music plays in. Could Thom be sharing his next focus with us? It is possible and probable that our next Radiohead experience will have even more to do with the relation between their music and the silence it breaks, and Give Up The Ghost could be giving us a clue... How do we sound to a... fly?



The steady and unsophisticated drum beat of Separator begins this song which strength lies in its looped echoing later part bouncing off this constant beat. The textures of sound come in and out of focus as well, the voice, guitar parts, vocal harmony, beat again; we are being surrounded by constant change, and we are also given a buffer before... we come away from our latest Radiohead experience worried that we might have lost our dear Thom Yorke for good now, and that he is not interested in our exterior world anymore. This song separates us from the spiritual world of this phenomenal creation.



Not every Radiohead fan will llke this album but we should all remember that trying to evaluate this music and lyrics upon listening to these songs a couple of times is simply silly. This is not an album you fall in love with in your heart. You expose your subconscious levels to this music and given time it will make you attuned to its delicate vibrations. I have been listening to this album for over a month now, but I can't just be randomly listening to it (and it happens to be the worst skiing music). It is simply too intense of an experience to experience it fully. It takes much longer to get there. For me that means loud quality sound all around me, on repeat, over and over again for at least a few hours... Welcome to The King Of Limbs...