The King of Limbs, an introspection

In what some could consider shocking news, Pitchfork gave their long-awaited review of Radiohead's new album The King of Limbs today, handing out the lowest rating of any of the band's studio albums (not counting Pablo Honey): a 7.9.

In relative terms, Pitchfork's next lowest rating for a Radiohead album was Amnesiac with a 9.0. Obviously, the fine line where The King of Limbs falls is somewhat of a mystery to this point. Fanfare from the album has been everywhere from sorely disappointing, to splendidly crafted and underrated. Yet, from most viable sources and variable discussions, there's a safe consensus to say that it's no one's preferred Radiohead work.

So, what is it then that deviates where The King of Limbs acclimates itself in the Radiohead catalog? Four years after the release of In Rainbows, an album that seemed underwhelming by some at the time of its release, but has aged remarkably, what possible directions the band would take moving forward seemed unrefined. What has inevitably become, to the disappointment of many, is a downsizing of their work.

Hail to the Thief was a massive sprawl of sounds and complicated ideas often found to be too broad and reveling, making the band that was known for continually manipulating its own creative apex sound like they were trying just a bit too hard. But if In Rainbows was a down-sizing from Hail to the Thief, than The King of Limbs is the band's sordid attempt to minimize anything and everything that made the group seem so impossibly large.

For some, the album is a reversion to the early-2000s sound of the band where the anthemic guitars of the late-90s ceased to be a mechanism of genial comfort and the group learned to expand boundaries they had previously not traversed. In hindsight, that thought may be implausible; there's little to no way to quantify the new album.

The severe intricacy of the eight tracks is often deceiving, but that's largely an inept excuse for a lack of sheer emotionality that innately touches the average Radiohead listener. That very same emotionality that fans experienced with most of the group's previous albums isn't totally absent this time around, but in the same regard isn't anywhere near that of, say, In Rainbows. Much of Thom Yorke's vocal work is muddled behind modifiers and looping rhythms, perhaps hindering the band's most brilliant asset as well.

But despite its honest contractions, The King of Limbs is still an encapsulating collection of songs, especially for the album's latter half. It's unfortunate, however, that the waning moments of the album's final song, "Separator," remind us of Radiohead's best, as Yorke's swirling wails of "Wake me up/wake me up" fill in the vacuum of silence that make many of us wonder when/if The King of Limbs Pt. II will be released.

So is disappointment surely justified, if that's the consensus? Possibly. Again, this is Radiohead. The fact that they made something that was almost universally penned as lacking astonishing exception is something of a frenetic anomaly, considering the group's unparalleled consistency and pace of altering directions. Anything less than stellar can be considered a disappointment.

To give the album the benefit of the doubt, the full impact of the work cannot be honestly contested until either a second half comes out (only a rumor), or a year or two pass. That's the value of a Radiohead album, in reality - too difficult to accurately quantify without repetitively analyzing every microcosm of significance. It's a lengthy process, but one that usually entails work worth the unquestioned merit.