Issue 515

Radiohead The King of Limbs W.A.S.T.E. The fantastic thing that Radiohead have always done is they've always surprised and not just followed the obvious path of creation. They've always stood apart, but they also grow from their own music, with each release being a change and adjustment from everything that has preceded it. Radiohead have never truly "gone backwards" or returned to a familiar sound that they've delivered before. The Oxford quintet's eighth album is titled 'The King of Limbs' in honour of one of Great Britain's oldest trees, Big Belly Oak, which is estimated to have stood in the 4000-acre Savernake Forest in Wiltshere, England, for between 1,000 and 1,100 years. It currently stands less than three miles from where they recorded the album, a location the band the band very deliberately chose. It's all very much part of the creative process. 'The King of Limbs' makes the most sense if you think of it as a representative sound of its inspiration. It begins with Bloom, all twisted and gnarly knots like roots deep underground, the Miles Davis-like stabs of brass coming out of the gloom like the first hint of growth emerging into the day from within the ground. The album slowly unravels itself over the course of a further seven tracks, culminating in the glorious closer Separator, one of the most beautiful songs in Radiohead's canon, reaching straight towards the sky. There are kinks and coils in the form of skittering beats that sound abnormal, but are in fact the organic drumbeats from Phil Selway cut up then pieced back together. Colin Greenwood's bass playing is sublime on the first five tracks in particular, as restless rhythms collide with Yorke's pensive vocal delivery on the jittery Morning Mr Magpie, which alongside Little By Little features more guitar than the other tracks, but never sounds like something you'd expect to hear. Feral finds the group fascinated by dub-step, while the single Lotus Flower is thick with groove and sinewy, sinister melody. After the first five tracks, Radiohead really begin to reach for the sun, with Codex a spectral piano ballad that's haunting and stunningly beautiful. Give Up The Ghost is like a lost acoustic Neil Young track circa 'On The Beach', and Separator is brilliant in the way that it introduces musical elements in so, before concluding that "If you think this is over, you're wrong," as Yorke instructs, "wake me up, wake me up" over and over again. And then, it's over. 'The King of Limbs' is incredibly short at only eight tracks and thirty-eight minutes, but it feels like a complete body of work that's very deliberately constructed and brilliantly executed. Andrew Weaver