Heart of a Punk Soul of a Rasta

Radiohead The King of Limbs

And so on the penultimate Friday of February without any pomp or circumstance Radiohead released their eighth studio LP "The King of Limbs", onto an unsuspecting world.

Now when we last met up with Radiohead "In Rainbows" I had far too much to say. So much so that this time round my good friend (ha) and fanzine cohort John Bigot has asked me to "bleeding well keep it brief this time". But he needn't have been concerned because there's not much to say about The King of Limbs. It's understatement with a very tiny u. After listening to it, all you need do is ask yourself two questions. What do you want from Radiohead? And how do intend to imbibe their stuff? ou see if you take your Radiohead with a large mug of TEA (you know what I mean - mellow moments) I guess you'll think King of Limbs is a beautifully crafted, nuance enriched set of mindscapes, both uplifting and life affirming and probably Tom Yorke's finest humanist spiritual meditations to date, with each meditation set to a wonderfully vague almost minimally implacable collection of musical atmospherics.

But if you've tuned in because you want to hear an expansively progressive band of musicians once known as Radiohead, whose reach once extended further than their grasp, a band who'd to toss in a wrongun just when you think you've got them taped. And if you want to ROCK, and get your pulse and temples in a flux, well, I don't know what you'll think of The King of Limbs, not much I guess.

For me The King of Limbs is best taken in the morning. You see I don't drink tea anymore. The album opens keenly enough with "Bloom" and Yorke calling the faithful to prayer in a wailing Arabic fashion. But the band doesn't seem present (only Nigel Goodrich) and the choice of more "trip hop" "funky drummer" too many beats per second percussion has become rather passé. Something a bit more acoustic and North African may have been more pleasing. "Morning Mr Magpie" follows and though it's linear in composition, like the rest of what follows, it's infused with the right amount of urgency to compel. This is the case also with "Lotus Flower" but the likes of "Give up the Ghost" and "Feral" are just, well, DULL.

As I've already said The King of Limbs is understatement with a very tiny u. What it needs is a moment of unleashed wraith or anger or outrage or even unbridled passion, to lend some definition to the moments of pause and reverie. A moment of instrumental virtuosity, something discordant and left field, or just someone kicking over a music stand would do. But the moment never comes, and though there is nothing essentially wrong with The King of Limbs, but wholistically it just seems like vague and myopically blurred happening. A pleasant vague and myopically blurred happening, but nothing more.

And that's just what I thought when I saw the front cover of the album. Hey it's a vague and myopically blurred image. But then I put on my 3D glasses! Wow, now I can see it! Err no, actually it is just a vague and myopically blurred image.