The latest and eighth album from the great British band Radiohead has just been released as a digital download. A physical CD version will be release in March while a special ‘newspaper’ edition will be available in May.
The ‘newspaper’ edition sounds interesting and will contain two 10-inch vinyl records in a special record sleeve, many large sheets of artwork, 625 tiny pieces of artwork, a compact disc, and a colour piece of oxo-degradable plastic package.
The King of Limbs was first announced on the band’s official website on February 14th, five days before it was going to be release to the surprise of many Radiohead fans.
The artwork is by Stanley Donwood, who along with producer Nigel Giodrich is considered a honorary member by most fans. The cover is certainly distinctive.
The first single taken from The King of Limbs is the beautiful Lotus Flower and in the music video (YouTube link) Thom Yorke has an interesting dancing moves when performing the new song.
As for the album, it features eight tracks with the highlight being Codex, Lotus Flower and Morning Mr Magpie. It just sounds fantastic with the groovy, dance feel. The Telegraph posted a track-by-track review with the overall impression as positive.
Next request, please announce a new live tour Radiohead! I want to see these tracks perform live.
Radiohead rush forward digital release of new album The King of Limbs. As reported by The Telegraph.
An enigmatic tweet posted by Radiohead which spread rapidly around the world has resulted in the cancellation of an event in Tokyo due to the high volume of fans expected to attend.
The message, written in Japanese and posted on Twitter by the popular British band, read simply: “Hachiko Square Shibuya, 59 minutes 18 Friday.”
In a textbook example of the viral powers of tweeting, the message circulated around the world, with fans deducing that the band was planning an impromptu gig.
Many decided Radiohead would most likely appear at 18.59pm in Hachiko Square, a popular meeting place in central Tokyo, overlooking the city’s famous Shibuya Crossing.
Shortly after the message was posted, PRs intervened to publicly dispel reports that the band would be appearing in person, with many fans instead concluding that they would broadcast their new album from the giant video screens that surround the square.
Today, however, the plan appeared to have backfired as organisers confirmed that the “event” was cancelled just hours before it was due to take place amid growing safety concerns.
To compensate for the cancellation, Radiohead instead brought forward the digital release of their eighth album The King of Limbs, by 24 hours on the internet.
Confirming cancellation of the event, a spokeswoman in Tokyo said: “Nothing is happening now. It’s been cancelled due to the massive amounts of re-tweeting, for public safety reasons.”
The non-event in Tokyo was the latest twist in a week of surprises for Radiohead fans. On Monday, the band announced on their website, without warning or the usual media machine fanfare, that they would shortly be releasing their eighth album The King of Limbs.
Only 48 hours after news emerged of the album – which was due to be available from tomorrow via their website – the mysterious Japanese tweet was posted.
Despite the eleventh hour cancellation, crowds of Radiohead fans – from schoolgirls and teens in hoodies to office workers – waited patiently in the cold in Hachiko Square at the time of the scheduled Tokyo event in the hope of either seeing the band or footage of their new videos.
However, as 18.59 came and went, the giant moving screen billboards which overlook Shibuya Crossing continued to broadcast a string of advertisements and the salaryman rush hour crowds continued to pour across the square – with no sign of any Radiohead activity.
Among the disappointed fans was Chiaki Marutani, 28, an editor from Tokyo, who had rushed to Hachiko from her office after work in order to find out what the event was about.
“I heard about it via a friend on twitter and I was really excited,” she said. “I’ve seen them play live in Tokyo before and I like them a lot.
“It’s really disappointing that nothing is happening at all. They could at least have apologised on the screens. I’m surprised at how many people have turned up still. It’s a shame they had to cancel it.”
Rie Yamada, a 19-year-old student, added: “I’m not sure what I was expecting to happen but I’m not very impressed with nothing happening at all. There are lots of people here waiting and no one has any idea what’s going on.”
Since the unexpected success of their first hit “Creep”, Radiohead have forged a reputation as a band which is as unconventional as it is surprising, shunning mainstream marketing strategies.
Radiohead’s most diligent fans perhaps may have anticipated the band’s Twitter stunt from a posting made just last week by guitarist Ed O’Brien on their website.
Extolling the powers of twitter and other social networking tools under the heading The Dignity Revolution, he wrote: “What have twitter and facebook every done for us? […] I have to say, I’ve become increasingly excited over the last three months about the possibilities of this form of communication.
“It’s in the arena of public protest that it seems twitter and facebook are increasingly the means by which popular movements throughout the world are able to come together and mobilise.”
The Guardian is posted a live blog about the new album from Radiohead. See link here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/feb/18/radiohead-king-of-limbs-live
Radiohead fan site has more information on the band.
http://www.ateaseweb.com/
The Guardian’s review of The King of Limbs.
Radiohead’s release schedule is not, you imagine, geared towards helping music critics. Minimal warnings, last-minute changes of plan and confusing announcements posted on Twitter in Japanese – does Thom Yorke not realise we have tight deadlines? The end result is a mad-rush by critics, bloggers and Tweet-freaks to be first to post their opinion on The King of Limbs’ eight tracks. Trouble is, Radiohead don’t make music designed for a hurried listen. A couple more plays down the line and the opinions you read here may be subject to change.
The King of Limbs begins in a manner that will no doubt make both Radiohead fans and critics smile – a looped piano riff reminiscent of Philip Glass is interrupted by crackly interference before disjointed rhythms and bleeps cascade over it. It’s an abstract, awkward introduction of the sort that has become so synonymous with the Oxford band that Vice magazine felt able to send them up this week with a spoof “first review” (sample line: “P£T£R P£PP£R is Thom Yorke’s deeply personal reaction to the events of the banking crisis, while Johnny Greenwood plays a timpani with a zither”).
Still, bands don’t become stadium-sized cult heroes if they’re nothing more than avant-garde soundscapers. And 30 seconds into Bloom, the track shuffles itself around and falls into place, haphazard noises settling down into a repetitive drum march as Thom Yorke announces himself.
There is much here that will please the ‘Head faithful, who will delight in the claustrophobic likes of Morning Mr Magpie and Little By Little. But you don’t have to be a diehard fan to see the worth in Codex, a beautiful melody brought into focus by the band’s decision to dispense of the usual trimmings in favour of piano and ghostlike effects. Closing track Separator – propelled by wandering bass and a bright guitar figure – ensures the album closes far more strongly than it opens.
These songs occupy an emotional terrain that Radiohead have mapped out as their own and – to their credit – others have failed to copy. What’s disappointing, however, is that the band – so often held up as musical mavericks operating in the mainstream – have failed to come up with anything that might surprise us this time. Early albums such as The Bends, OK Computer and Kid A carved out a radical new direction. Since then Radiohead have settled into a sound – abstract lyrics, jittery rhythms, echoes of leftfield electronica – meaning that this teeters on the brink of self-parody.
Their last album, 2007’s In Rainbows, was perhaps the best of Radiohead’s later releases, incorporating a more human (not to mention melodic) touch. Any hints that some light and shade was beginning to appear in the Radiohead canon have been largely snuffed out here, which is disappointing. Yes, you can still marvel that one of the world’s biggest bands are releasing music totally lacking in commercial concerns. And yes, they’re still leading the pack when it comes to releasing music in an exciting, innovative way. But whereas their business model is unusual, there’s a nagging feeling that The King of Limbs is more like business as usual.
Radiohead have once again lived up to their reputation as the most unpredictable – some would say awkward – name in music by releasing their new album 24 hours early, just days after disclosing its existence.
The King Of Limbs is the band’s first recording in more than three years and their second to dispense with the traditional backing of a record label. While 2007’s In Rainbows was released as an internet-only download, with the added twist of “honesty box” payment system in which purchasers parted with what they thought the album was worth, the new title comes in a range of formats.
Radiohead announced The King of Limbs on Monday with a brief note on the group’s website headlined, “Thank you for waiting” and stating that the release was on Saturday. Then came the decision to move the release forward a day, inscrutably explained by a brief band statement saying that since the album was ready “there was no need to wait”.
More confused still were Japanese fans, large numbers of whom braved chill winds to gather at a square in Tokyo’s Shibuya district. They were drawn by a post on the band’s official Twitter feed suggesting something special would be happening there at 18:59 on Friday, taken by many to assume a performance of some sort.
Radiohead’s Japanese record label quickly denied this but a crowd still gathered. Nothing happened, except an apology on the label’s website to those “who saw the tweet and got excited”.
Such obtuseness is all part of the appeal for Radiohead fans who have watched the band evolve over the past 18 years from a generic indie rock outfit to purveyors of occasionally impenetrable electronica.
A defining characteristic of this career arc has been the way every Radiohead move to wrongfoot their fans has simply made them more devoted, and numerous. The King of Limbs is no difference: amid the flood of Twitter excitement at its arrival came complaints about the band’s website freezing under the strain of numbers.
Perhaps the biggest surprise came in the release to YouTube of a video for one track, Lotus Flower. This features singer Thom Yorke, a man usually caricatured as an over-serious grump, don a bowler hat to perform an exuberant, arm-twisting shimmy pitched somewhere between stage school-style interpretative dance and an over-refreshed uncle at a wedding.
On Twitter some were more impressed than others. “If I ever saw a dude dancing at a club like that I’d be kind of freaked out,” was one US fan’s verdict.
The cheapest version of the album for UK fans is an MP3 digital one at £6, while an extra £3 brings the CD-quality sound of a WAV file. For extra £24 these can be augmented, at a later date, with what the band’s website describes as a “Newspaper Album”, comprising a pair of 10-inch vinyl discs, a CD, plus “many large sheets of newspaper artwork, 625 tiny pieces of artwork and a full-colour piece of oxo-degradable plastic to hold it all together”.
Source: The Guardian
The BBC Music review of Radiohead’s new album.
Radiohead’s sense of timing is quite something. Just when it looks like Arcade Fire, on a high after victory at the Grammy and Brit awards, are set to become The Biggest Band In The World, the Oxford five-piece confirm that their eighth album isn’t only done, but yours for a few bucks in mere seconds – no need to get dressed, let alone leave the house. When it looks like teenage hip hop crew Odd Future are going to send Twitter into meltdown on the back of an alarming video, these old-timers position their own promo clip online, sit back and watch social networks collapse under the weight of a million thumbs-in-a-frenzy sorts expressing their adoration.
Their grasp of timing, in an arrangements-versus-attentions sense, is equally remarkable. Just as 2007’s In Rainbows shaved several minutes from the run-time of the preceding Hail to the Thief, so The King of Limbs cuts the(ir) full-length form down to a concise eight tracks and 37 minutes. It’s the band’s shortest-ever album, perfectly tuned to the listener of the 21st century – perhaps more likely to listen to music on the way in or out of work, on a commute, than at their leisure with a nice glass of red. Of course, the digital distribution of the band’s previous LP was so successful that this set was sure to follow a similar release pattern – something tangible will follow in March – but this is a remarkably neat-and-tidy package. Perhaps it wasn’t sequenced with succinctness in mind; but that it does its job in a short space of time is important.
Because if The King of Limbs dragged its… limbs… for too much longer, the impression left might be very different. For five tracks this album unfolds in a manner very similar to In Rainbows’ memorable array of electro-chirrups and synth-sweeps, all glitches and groans where, a decade previous, Radiohead were very much A Guitar Band. The staggering, off-kilter step of opener Bloom might not click with those holding a candle for The Return of the Gallagher a week from this record’s release, but to anyone with even half an ear tuned to In Rainbows it’ll seem very (although not over-) familiar indeed. Morning Mr Magpie plucks its way into a Foals-ian spin, the masters seemingly taking on board a few tips from their hometown pupils. Lotus Flower – the source of #thomdance Twitter activity once its video was unveiled – is another piece that looks backwards rather than projecting into bold, new sonic territories. It flails and flaps, but in a manner entirely in keeping with its makers’ predilection for the metronomic – to the wrong ears, it’s five minutes of the same beat, utterly unremarkable.
But that’s the beauty of Radiohead – they’ve never, certainly not since the breakthrough days of Creep, been a band for the people. They’re too idiosyncratic for that, and even though there are moments aplenty here that suggest the band hasn’t furthered their vision, subtle differences to a tested formula ensure The King of Limbs is another great album from Britain’s most consistently brilliant band. And come Codex, it truly strikes the listener dumb. Like Motion Picture Soundtrack, Street Spirit, Sail to the Moon, Nude – insert your own favourite slow-paced Radiohead numb-er here – it’s a piece of rarefied beauty. Thom says something about dragonflies, something else about nobody getting hurt; the words blur and blend, though, as beneath them the simplest, most strikingly gorgeous piano motif bores its way into the heart. And it’s here, not any of your limited-character blogging or video-sharing sites, that Radiohead trump all comers, again.
Soure: http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/wd4z
The Observer’s review on the new Radiohead album, The King Of Limbs.
In the end, it arrived early. Announced on Valentine’s Day – and, perhaps not uncoincidentally, the eve of the Brits – the eighth Radiohead album was eventually sprung on the world a day before anyone was expecting it. That was an act of mischievous digital benevolence so typical of Radiohead, a band rewriting the rules of pop engagement on the fly.
Judging from their most recent black-and-white portrait, in which the band slope awkwardly at the bottom of an ancient tree, The King Of Limbs could, by rights, have been their acid folk album – one informed by the writing of Roger Deakin, perhaps. Indeed, seven tracks in, Give Up the Ghost – a mellow and mantric song strung on acoustic guitars and announced by birdsong – gives a hint of what might have been.
By contrast, anyone following Thom Yorke’s recent Office Chart blog posts might have been expecting a record in thrall to dubstep, or even more obscure electronic micro-genres. Fulfilling that brief is Feral, a sinuous bass shakedown at the heart of this typically contrary, intermittently stunning, album.
Yorke’s deep affinity with musical outriders such as LA’s Flying Lotus – upon whose album Cosmogramma he guested last year – is manifest. Bloom, the album’s opening track, is underscored by wild jazz polyrhythms. Well, this is a 21st-century Radiohead album; it was never going to be easy listening.
In truth, The King of Limbs sounds a little predictable, certainly at first. It is very much the heir to 2007’s In Rainbows, imbued with some of the spirit of Yorke’s solo outing, 2006’s The Eraser. Which is to say, it sounds another death knell for fans of The Bends and OK Computer still hoping for a late recantation and a return to anthemic guitar rock.
Guitars are very thin on the ground in Radiohead’s dark wood. The most traditional sounds here occur on the splendid Codex, in which a stately, distant piano bongs mournfully. Restless rhythms abound. But they never quite resolve into dance beats – despite Yorke’s brave moves in the video that accompanies Lotus Flower. It should have stopped traffic in Tokyo last Friday at rush hour, but because of crowd concerns, the screening on Hachiko Square’s giant video screens was pulled.
Radiohead’s works reward close and long listening; this dense and knotted eight-track album is no exception. But one of its most instant delights was the sense of giddy communion last Friday, as fans and observers awaited, then savoured, the record in real time.
A week on since the new Radiohead was available to download, The Guardian has posted a final review of The King of Limbs.
It’s hard to think of an album that sparked more internet discussion in such a short space of time as Radiohead’s The King of Limbs did last Friday. Spurred into action by its arrival a day earlier than expected, harassed reviewers reviewed it on first hearing, and commenters and bloggers complained that it was ridiculous to offer opinions based on one listen, then offered their opinions about it anyway. Other journalists sidestepped having to form any views of their own by writing pieces that simply collated other people’s, some of which were admittedly pretty amazing. “A few consider it awfully doomy,” noted the Los Angeles Times, highlighting the hitherto-unheard subsection of Radiohead’s fanbase apparently distraught the band had chosen to abandon their trademark boozy, good-time boogie sound.
All that virtual ink spilt and what did we learn about The King of Limbs? Largely that it lends itself less well to the kind of snap judgements Radiohead’s current woo-hoo-we’re-BEHIND-YOU modus operandi forces critics to make than its predecessor. In Rainbows handily offered them the sound of latterday Radiohead at their most prosaic. It foregrounded the guitars and songs of the tried-and-tested-stage favourite variety, relegating the electronics and experiments to a prominent supporting role: the result was as warm and human-sounding an album as Radiohead have made.
But The King of Limbs is structured not unlike David Bowie’s Low: the more obviously song-based material in one half, sonic experiments in the other – but with the tough stuff first. Opener Bloom is dense, knotted and difficult, clattering rhythms, scattered pulses of bass, no verse-chorus structure, not much of a tune. Somewhere between a mess and a thrilling flood of barely marshalled ideas – a sensation amplified by the recording, which keeps slipping into needles-in-the-red distortion – it’s music that’s almost wilfully difficult to get a handle on. The lyrics are as elliptical as ever, but the overall message appears to be: try and form a quick opinion about this. Candidates are reminded to write on both sides of the paper. Handwriting and spelling, as well as the fact that a lot of people who thought Kid A was impenetrable ended up calling it the album of the decade, will be taken into account.
You could argue that there’s more fun to be had in imagining deadline-pressured hacks trying to work out what to say about The King of Limbs’ first five tracks than there is in actually listening to them. But if the overall impression is of a band so lost in sound they forgot to write songs, you have to admit the sound is pretty fascinating: the way the vocals shift unexpectedly in volume and clarity, the restless guitars that underpin Morning Mr Magpie and add a sense of agitation to a song that appears to be about the banking crisis, the bass overload and scattered vocal samples of Feral. This latter is the clearest example of those singles by Zomby, Untold and Ramadanman that Thom Yorke keeps plugging on the Radiohead website exerting an influence on the band’s sound. What’s intriguing is how well-incorporated it is; it’s one of Radiohead’s USPs that they are able to assimilate influences from dance music’s outer limits without ever sounding like they’re trying too hard.
When the album finally finds a more conventional focus, its structure makes sense as something more than a reaction against In Rainbows’ user-friendliness. Lotus Flower, a new addition to what you have to say is a fairly slender catalogue of Radiohead songs about having it off, is as plaintive and sensual as the preceding tracks are opaque and remote – a trick repeated on Give Up the Ghost’s sigh of submission. Neither are exactly a barrel of laughs, but they nevertheless feel like a long, relieved exhalation of breath after Feral’s muggy, wordless dread.
Codex, meanwhile, is the kind of piano ballad that Radiohead were inadvertently responsible for making a default setting in rock music of recent years: such things obviously existed before OK Computer, but you can draw a pretty direct line between Karma Police and the stuff that gets played in the background when an X Factor hopeful starts talking about a recently deceased relative. It should sound hackneyed, but it doesn’t. The melody is beautiful, but it winds and turns unexpectedly. The spectral brass and strings do the opposite of what orchestral arrangements usually do: instead of cosseting you with lushness, there’s something unsettling about the way they weave in and out of the song.
Listening to it, you’re reminded that Radiohead are the only band of their size and status that seem driven by an impulse to twist their music into different shapes. As The King of Limbs proves, when it works it’s glorious, but that impulse doesn’t always yield perfect results. Still, listening to Radiohead try is never less than intriguing; after all, their peers aren’t trying at all.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/feb/24/radiohead-king-limbs-review