King of Limbs

Radiohead

King of Limbs



(Originally published in The Wire)

“Wake me up…“ slurs Thom Yorke on The King Of Limbs’s final track, “Separator“. Ever since Radiohead repositioned themselves (as an ‘experimental’ group), there’s been something very somnolent - heavy-lidded, cotton-headed - about their music. I have to admit I’ve sometimes found it (literally) soporific, and I confess I’ve never made it through Kid A without falling asleep. Radiohead come off like dream music, but it’s as if we are outside the dream, watching the dreamer thrash about, listening for clues in all the babble, nonsense and non-sequiturs. Isn’t this what Yorke’s mewls and mumbles most resemble: sleeptalk? On “Morning Mr Magpie”, Yorke sounds like he’s rehearsing or remembering some fight (physical and/ or emotional) - “you’ve got some nerve”, he sings - and I’m reminded of the solemn comedy of watching a dreaming man wrestle with his bedclothes.

So, for a long time, I’ve been unable to resolve feelings of ambivalence towards Radiohead. The case for dismissal was that, far from being a risk, there was something too easy, too tasteful, about Radiohead’s move from stadium angst into a sound that often felt like Experimental ™. The suspicion was that this whole reinvention could be little than a millionaire’s leisure pursuit, and that Radiohead are symptomatic of a situation in which ’another postpunk’ is now impossible: because rather than establishing a circuit between the mainstream and the underground, Radiohead operate as a gigantic niche commodity that reassures its consumers but does nothing to perturb the high street.

The case for surrender, however, is that Radiohead - nowhere more than on The King of Limbs - achieve one of Eno’s ambitions for rock: that it would become a vague music. The sound here - shimmery acoustic guitars, multi-tracked vocal, drums that palpitate like an amphetamine heartbeat - is both disciplined-lean and smeary-impressionist, a kind of post-kraut white funk. It’s the edgy drums that, above all else here, keep the music from ever resolving into either bliss or misery. This is music defined by negative capability, made out of anxieties so disabling , or mystic revelations so fugitive, that they can’t articulate themselves, can‘t be made intelligible. Yorke’s voice - that invertebrate whine which ought to be divisive (and decisive), which ought to either seduce or repel in some definitive way, but which had up until now tended only to reinforce my equivocal feelings towards the group - is always on the edge of signification, as if he has just recovered the power of speech, or is in the process of losing it. On “Feral”, in fact, words are entirely absent, and Yorke’s vocals (sighs, slips, hiccups) are transformed into a series of hall of mirror doppelgangers - as cartoon bulbous and translucent as the Pac-Man-like ghosts on the record’s cover - which flit around and under each other, the track coming off like a distant cousin of Darkstar’s “Aidy’s Girl Is A Computer”.

It‘s “Feral“, “Codex” and “Giving Up The Ghost” that finally win me over. “Codex” is a post-traumatic ballad, its lushly decaying piano chords, disconsolate horns and aphasic vocals resonating with cryptic affect. “Give Up The Ghost”, meanwhile, quivers and havers on the edge of non-existence, an acoustic ballad as tremulous as Durutti Column at their most hesitant, Yorke whimpering and whispering against a loop of his own voice, which might be repeating one phrase - “don’t hurt me” - or permutating near-variations of it: “don’t love me” … or “don’t haunt me”. That’s it: I’m converted.