Radiohead - The King of Limbs

I think I am getting a bit fed up of Radiohead's, I dunno, vagueness? Ambiguity? It was alright for a bit and quite welcome when Thom decided his vocals would be a bit more oblique on albums like Kid A, but the band's approach on KoL really lacks tenacity and I'm left wishing they'd give me something to get my teeth into. It's not as though the lyrics on 90s Radiohead albums were bad.

Kings of Lettice morelike..

Morning Mr. Magpie and Little by Little still sound great imo

I like Little By Little and Give Up The Ghost, sure, but in the same way I like A Reminder or Melatonin.

This is probably my most-played album by them (proportionally, given how long I've had it) by them.

By them.

Are there any demos where Yorke is accompanied by any of the other members singing? I think his falsetto in unison w/ maybe something a little more throaty would be a v v interesting equation

like as if radiohead stopped w/ the progressive instrumental schtick and did something new w/ vocals. the "meep meep meep" of kid a's intro doesn't entirely count b/c they never really did that again, so far as i'm aware

all that talk about his voice was in a canadian interview/special about kid a. i'll try to find it now.

here it is... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DdQWrQdIAk
it's in there somewhere.

Well, when he first started doing falsetto, there weren't that many people 'influenced by Jeff Buckley', and now every damn body is...

― Mark G, Monday, September 26, 2011 3:54 AM (16 hours ago)

falsetto ≠ Jeff Buckley influenced

York was influenced by Buckley at one point though (specifically he credited his vocal on "Fake Plastic Trees" being inspired by seeing JB perform)

Yorke

yeah i know Yorke was (kinda) - was talkin bout everyone else

listened to In Rainbows today and while it has moments of great power (and while, as an album, it really does seem to have a great, thoughtful movement to it) I join with those who think Yorke's vocal contributions are favoring sonics a little too hard - very little of what he says comes through the falsetto haze. It sounds nice, but I'd like a lyrical hook or two like "I am back to save the universe" or "we hope that you choke" or even "knives out, catch the mouse"

still haven't heard King of Limbs

i bet people still post on atease, lmfao

I bet people still read general interest stories about popular music in periodicals without actually being interested in the bands, lol

they tore shit up on colbert!. too bad they had to cut "the national anthem" short.

falsetto ≠ Jeff Buckley influenced

wasn't intimating it was.

Some radio show was playing "first not-hit singles by bands that became very famous" and whoa, that Coldplay one. The band were very good but wasn't Chris Martin Jeffing?

The only Coldplay song i can tolerate

they tore shit up on colbert!. too bad they had to cut "the national anthem" short.

― Creeztophair, Tuesday, 27 September 2011 07:28 (15 hours ago) Bookmark

this was great, huh? i heard this record when it came out & then tuned out but am looking forward to going back to it. the uhh second & third songs they played were really something.

"The Daily Mail" is so great.

Wow they were really good on Colbert. I didn't really like 'daily mail' and 'bloom' on record but they sound pretty good live with horns.

There's a studio version of The Daily Mail?

There's the "Live From The Basement" version, that's pretty much a studio take. I grabbed the audio for myself!

I only realised how amazing National Anthem sounds the other day, after having played Kid A since it came out.

National Anthem was the only thing I liked on Kid A at first, because it sounded like it could have been on XTRMNTR.

I found it too brash and pompous when I first got the album. Now I think it's great - sounds like a hip hop DJ mixing marching band records at top volume.

the colbert thing was weird the interview chat bits

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/oct/14/radiohead-king-limbs-follow-up

i think it'd be great if Rhead picked up a second drummer...

Apparently, I'm a "waste" member:

Dear waste member.

We have two items of Radiohead news for you today.

Firstly, Radiohead: LIVE From The Basement - on DVD & Blu-Ray

Radiohead's TV performance of The King Of Limbs is now available to order on DVD and Blu-Ray.

The programme was a live studio performance of The King of Limbs.
There are also performances of two new unreleased
Radiohead songs: The Daily Mail and Staircase.
Supercollider has also been added as a bonus track to the original programme.

Radiohead: The King Of Limbs, Live From The Basement comes in 2 formats: Blu-Ray with DVD and a DVD only, both in a 32 page hardback book with lots of nice photos and also with a download link.

Order HERE for Christmas Delivery; the download code will go live on the 19th December.

A digital only version is available on iTunes from the 19th
December. The DVD & Blu-Ray (no download) will be in
selected retail outlets towards the end of January 2012.

Secondly, Radiohead go on tour in 2012

We are happy to announce the first part of some live shows we will be doing next year, there will be more to follow, but here are the first run of dates:

February:
27thMiami, FLAmerican Airlines Arena
29thTampa, FLSt. Pete Times Forum

March:
1stAtlanta, GAPhilips Arena
3rdHouston, TXToyota Center
5thDallas, TXAmerican Airlines Center
7thAustin, TXFrank Erwin Center
9thSt. Louis, MOScottrade Center
11thKansas City, MOSprint Center
13thBroomfield, CO1st Bank Center
15thGlendale, AZJobing.com Arena

For more information on the dates and tickets please visit the Radiohead Tour Dates on the band's website.

You wasteman! I'm so over King Of Limbs it's unreal. And that remix album is largely cobblers.

I don't really get why they decided to commission so many remixes. I mean, it's cool that some of these producers are on RADIOHEAD REMIX PROJECT because it sells some copies, but there are only a few of them that I'd replay.

Kind of a weird experiment a decade after the Kid A "we're not going to really do singles or remixes" era

makes sense to me...they're inspired by all these current producers when making the record, might as well let them have a shot at it, since they're really a lot better at producing electronic music than radiohead are.

i think a couple of the remixes are improvements, but they sound very remix-y for the most part. it might have been more interesting to collab with these producers during the making of the record?

yeah, that's something i would like to see them do

Yeah, or possibly offering up a more limited selection of tracks to fewer producers.

Remixes of rock bands generally suck these days. You get the impression they're just thrown up like mashups. Someone's got a track and they paste the main vocal over the top. Job done. The best ones are when they change the whole feel and vibe of the track, but I don't really hear that on kol remixes

Remixes of rock bands generally suck these days.

Fixed.

i didn't hate king of limbs or anything but the basement show is much much better than the record?

― preschoolin' life (BradNelson), Sunday, July 10, 2011

this is so otm. wish i would have done it 6 months ago, but i finally got around to watching/listening to the full performance last night and came away feeling enthusiastic about most of the King of Limbs songs, if not the way they were recorded for the album.

this will probably make very little sense, but my basic thought is that all of that bullshit you'd hear around the Kid A/Amnesiac days (they're combining rock with electronic music, warp records influenced, etc) is actually starting to come to fruition with their KoL material. they've gotten so good at emulating electronic music that they've almost entered the Uncanny Valley where it's uncomfortable to listen to (on the album, at least). KoL doesn't sound like a group of guys standing around a room jamming together, it sounds like a bunch of short keyboard-generated clips that thom and jonny arranged into songs while sitting around a computer. and while i don't know the genesis of where the various sounds/clips came from (live playing vs. softsynths), the album ends up sounding very mechanical and edited, all the rough ends sanded off, and suffers because of that imo.

the live from the basement performance, on the other hand, really impresses me for a few reasons.

in their attempts to generate the instrumentation/tones/noises from the album, they naturally can't recreate it perfectly, and as a result the uncomfortable edited sheen of the album is dialed back a bit and the band emerges out of the Uncanny Valley. it's almost like Kraftwerk in reverse. For me, Kraftwerk really becomes transcendant when their music is just off the edge of the mechanical, just a touch into the human. stuff like 3:30 into "Home Computer" when the programmed snare diverts from it's strict 2s and 4s and almost gets funky for a second. historically, radiohead are sort of coming at this from the opposite direction. they started with all live instrumentation and have veered closer and closer to the purely electronic. there are times when they really sound like programmed machines on their newer material. it's kind of thrilling to me. it's almost like the man-machine ideas that Kraftwerk were striving for but had difficulty achieving live are finally possible. i'm not trying to argue that they're the first to do it or anything, but i do think they do it exceedingly well.

but emulating electronic loops using live instruments (as opposed to just using laptops) is difficult, and radiohead can't sustain that locked in feeling for too long, and the songs benefit from the slight reveal of their humanity. sometimes the human edge emerges purposefully (like on Morning Mr. Magpie when jonny occasionally interrupts his Gang of Four looped riff to lay out some Smiths-style chord washes), other times it's a subtle change in instrumentation or mixing.

and the use of two drummers (phil + portishead guy) reinforces the slight imperfections. they're both mechanical players, locked in (you can see Clive practicing to a metronome between songs in the From the Basement footage, making sure he kicks off and locks into 135BPM or whatever it might be), but when you put them together live, it's like two fine clocks that nonetheless still phase in and out of sync with each other, kind of like how even if you perfectly align a few CDs on Zaireeka, there will still be a hint of phasing in the playback because CD players don't stay perfectly in sync with each other.

none of this makes sense or is very persuasive, so apologies for tl;dr. but i'd encourage the subset of people that are generally radiohead fans but didn't really "get" KoL to check out the From the Basement show. the album is like an airbrushed senior yearbook photo of your friend where his acne is removed from the image using photoshop, the live performance is like a candid Instagram shot of the same guy hanging out in your kitchen.

oh, duh, i should have mentioned that the whole show is easily findable on youtube. just type in something like "from the basement + song", and replace "song" with one of the songs from the set:

01 Bloom
02 The Daily Mail
03 Feral
04 Little By Little
05 Codex
06 Separator
07 Lotus Flower
08 Staircase
09 Morning Mr Magpie
10 Give Up The Ghost

I was wondering if I should order the DVD but it came out while I was in Cornwall - might make ut the last media purchase I make as an employed person.

I dunno tho - I always warn ppl that attempting to draw conclusions about ~how artists work in the studio~ is pretty much just fan fiction. I don't know that stuff is assembled on a laptop and looped?

I have actually been enjoying the live clips, but more as a replacement for going to some stadium show where you see 5 ants on a stage (I haven't seen them live since South Park) Actually seeing how the songs are constructed or reconstructed is quite interesting as a music geek.

That version of Give Up The Ghost is p heartbreaking - becoming my favourite on the album - also shows it as not being constructed on a laptop but on a reel to reel tape recorder with all its wonky fallibility which I love.

If I remember correctly they had a video podcast thing a while ago that I must have subscribed to and downloaded. Was this the From the Basement videos? If so, I think they're on my home computer and I should get around to watching the whole thing sometime.

I dunno tho - I always warn ppl that attempting to draw conclusions about ~how artists work in the studio~ is pretty much just fan fiction. I don't know that stuff is assembled on a laptop and looped?

I guess my (confusing) point is that much of KoL, particularly the first half of the album, sounds like laptop loops, regardless of whether the loops were programmed directly into the laptop or extracted from longer live takes. Whereas the live versions reveal more of the human hand behind the repetition.

weird how people use "laptop" as synonymous with making electronic music. most studios run desktops, you know? i guess it's from dudes always having macs on stage.

I could kind of see them doing some of the looping bits at the mixing desk, but as for composition, I'd guess it's more likely they'd just play with hardware looping pedals and such in the studio.

I want to echo ZS's comments re: the Basement performance vs. the studio album. It really opens up the songs, and much as I don't want to use the term, its much more organic feeling than the studio version and therefore far more compelling.

There's also a Live From The Basement version of "In Rainbows" which is also great.

So this was kinda boring, yeah? Moreso than anything else they've done; the audience polarization aspect was the most interesting bit. New single not bad though.

What new single?

Lotus Flower and Codex are the only songs I can be bothered listening to any more.

Separator!