Radiohead - The King of Limbs

Give Up The Ghost! That's an amazing song. I still totally rate the last 5 songs on this album.

Though I do actually wish Staircase (but not Daily Mail which is blah) and Supercollider were on it.

Ok remember that a year ago I posted a link to rearrange the tracklist in accordance to the newspaper version? ( http://www.oesquema.com.br/trabalhosujo/2011/02/28/the-king-of-limbs-newspaper-album-ou-codex.htm#comment-21810 )

Well, I was thinking about using this rearranged tracklist and adding supercollider and staircase in there to make it a 10 track album. daily mail and butcher I feel like they disrupt the overall aesthetic of the album and I'm fine with leaving them as b-sides. I was also thinking of removing Feral completely and adding Staircase in there because it sounds great in between lotus flower and little by little. Without removing any of the original tracks this is what I came up with. I think it sounds fantastic. Give it a try and tell me what you think:

1) “Lotus Flower”
2) “Feral”
3) "Staircase"
4) “Little By Little”
5) “Codex”
6) “Give Up the Ghost”
7) " Supercollider"
8) “Morning Mr Magpie”
9) “Bloom”
10) “Separator”

Just had a quick listen to the Basement sessions and eff me if they aren't a zillion times better than the studio album. I just don't like the majority of KOL - too many experiments that don't work, like bad IDM. Bloom is the prime example - listening on good headphones makes it sound WORSE because you can hear all the horrible production clicks and it sounds like a CD skipping (not in a good way).

The King of Limbs is by far Radiohead's best EP.

RONG. That's How Am I Driving.

Wow, but atease really hate this record, don't they?

I only ever listen to the Basement recordings at this point. So much so that I actually ripped them myself, edited out the studio chatter, and arranged into a playlist so I can basically pretend it is the record.

ha, that's great. willing to share?

that sounds awesome.

love the cheapness of king of limbs, sounds homemade, like they made u a demo tape

Yes, homemade is a good way of putting it. It sounds very organic, the accretions of time, like it grew that way, shaggy and slightly mossy.

Wait, maybe that's ~Thom Yorke's hair~ I'm thinking of?

The Airbag EP has some great tracks on it but the tracks don't really mesh into a nice whole. Also Palo Alto is on there, and Palo Alto shouldn't be on anything.

Aw, I like "Palo Alto." If only for that crazy mean guitar tone.

OMG Melissa we can no longer be friends. Palo Alto is not just one of my favourite guitar tones but also contains some of my favourite Thommist lyrical images of all time - "in a beautiful bombshell I throw myself into my work!" but also the maniacal boredom with which he repeats that "I'm ok how are YOU!" line so that it almost sounds like a threat.

Also I love the artwork / packaging so so much and also the story of Thom and Stanley getting hold of an EMI marketing research questionnaire and ~customising~ it in their special way, I just love it as an object as well as the music on it.

Also Meeting In The Aisle is still my favourite RH song ever but we've been through this before.

How can you not like Palo Alto o_0

ya Palo Alto is p all time amazing

I love Meeting in the Aisle, but Palo Alto is just annoyingly sing-songy in its melody. I know it's supposed to be, but it goes too far for me to be able to enjoy actually listening to it.

Ok fair enough, because that is exactly what I love about it. It's got this real nursery rhyme, playground chant aspect to the melody, especially of the choruses that really highlights and brings to the foreground the repetitive and almost nonsensical aspects of ritual interrogative conversation especially in a workplace environment.

It's also one of those songs that totally sounds like he was describing when he wad talking about getting thoughtworms/earworms (obviously he didn't use thoughtworm as a phrase but he totally described a thoughtworm) and then he said words to the effect of "yeah I get them stuck in my head until I put them in a song, then they're out of my head and into YOUR head hahahahahahaha" ::maniacal Thom giggles::

Also Jesus Christ the textures on that song, did Jonny mic up a malfunctioning radiotelescope or what?

I keep moving from city to city and I always find myself singing along Palo Alto in my first days in the place even tho I don't even have it in my ipod and I've only listened to it on the Meeting People dvd.

this clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ4lMdFYOtU

Did we actually had a poll for this album? I'm just looking at two banned threads and one joke poll.

Either way we should make one with the 4 b-sides included.

i never really got into this i guess

good album. it feels quite a minor entry in their catalog though and I think that's because of its relatively short length. If they'd put The Daily Mail, Supercollider, etc. on it then I think it'd be seen as heftier.

Heft is what i go to Beethoven for - I actually rank TKOL just below Kid A, my favorite. Many of their albs are bloated where TKOL does what it sets out to, does it well and moves on not a minute too late.

I don't understand the hate for TKOL, the grooves that they achieve in here are excellent, they've been trying to hit this plateau for almost two decades. This is the first album where the band feel in full control of what they wanted to do, the interviews with the band sort of confirm it, they feel relaxed and happy. This might be the first RH record where Thom's interviews aren't unnecessarily cryptic.

have i said this? live from the basement tkol > tkol

Serious lol at the idea of any album being improved by adding The Daily Mail to it.

why not, Matt?

Xxpost yeah the LFTB version is loads better

i'm not crazy about TKOL, i feel like "in rainbows" is the best thing they've done. when i feel like listening to radiohead i put on in rainbows. it just exudes more of warmth and accessibility that a lot of the others. despite being a radiohead stan in my college years, nowadays i feel like i almost flat out don't like ok computer, the bends, HTTT, or TKOL.

Xxpost yeah the LFTB version is loads better

Agreed. It's the version of these songs that I still reach for.

this is still a very good, very interesting album (which has a much stronger second-half).

It's interesting and good but I still can't particularly get into it.

i went through the typical arc. loved it; began recognizing its flaws (lack of hooks, some meandering, interesting ideas that don't always yield interesting songs); returned to it a few years later and realize, again, it's damn good.

I don't remember where I read/heard this but someone somewhere said something about the title being a double reference: the obvious reference is the tree, but the secondary reference is the influence of dubstep. Considering the sound of a couple of the album's tracks ('Feral' most prominently and obviously) and the remix project that followed, this seems more than a little plausible.

I didn't read this whole topic, so sorry if someone's already mentioned this upthread.

But yes, King of Limbs is very high in my favorite Radiohead albums list. Arguably #2.

it's one of the most interesting radiohead discs. a big, interesting left-turn.

it's been three years! when's the next disc coming out? overdue.

Definitely a grower this one, the only track I'm not into at all now is Feral.

Three years to creep up on you is a hell of a slow-burner though.

And it's not like I didn't listen to it for two years, stuck it on one day and was like 'actually this is quite good'. They are one of my favourite bands and I have been actively trying to crack it since it came out.

i put it on this week for the first time in quite awhile and had the same reaction. it comes off much better without the weight of 'new radiohead album!' expectations. the second half is really lovely (codex!).

the only part i'm not into (still) is the offbeat guitars on 'little by little', it just seems unnecessarily awkward.

Wow. I thought 22 listens was a long time to persist with something one didn't really like. Three years is... wow.

Well it's not like I hated it or anything, always thought there were nice and interesting moments. And I'd maybe listen to it once every two weeks or something.

That wasn't a sarcastic "wow" - I'm actually quite impressed with that as a listening exercise, and an example of how music can grow on you.

If it was pretty much any other band I probably wouldn't have bothered.

Yeah, I completely understand that sentiment. That if you love everything else by an artist, except that *one* work, you would be more prepared to delve into it and figure out what made it tick.

(I still feel a bit bad about choosing not to make that effort with AMOK when it didn't click. But I also felt like that was an album I could force myself through repetition to like, but never really love.)

Sorry about the username synergy. Anyway...

The 4-song finale of LotusFlower-Codex-GiveUpTheGhost-Separator is on par with the best of their post-Kid A albums. In contrast, it's the first four songs of the album that sound like tossed-off B-sides. "Hail to the Thief" B-sides specifically.

There was a live guitar rendition of "Good Morning Mr. Magpie" floating around for years that was much better than the version that ended up on "King of Limbs." And several stand-alone tracks were released just before and after "King of Limbs" -- "These Are My Twisted Words," "Harry Patch (In Memory Of)," "Supercollider," "The Butcher." Should've added at least some of these to make it a complete 10- or 12-song album.

/Rant over (from a fan)

I agree. Second side is great. First side is weak but wouldn't matter so much if there were 12 songs instead of eight. I wouldn't mind Feral at all on Hail to the Thief but here I was like, Really? You're devoting one-eighth of your first album in four years to this?! KoL doesn't sound bad to me, just insubstantial, incomplete. It needed one of those annoying (but ultimately correct) A&R men who says go away and write some more songs, it's not done yet.

still waiting for this to creep up on me, probably doesn't help that I skip most of the tracks when they come up

was that guy from Friendly Furnaces actually kidding re 'Harry Patch'? i can't believe he was tbh.

In an interview with AOL's Spinner.com, Matthew Friedberger of The Fiery Furnaces criticized the song's release, saying of Radiohead: "Fuck you! You brand yourself by brazenly and arbitrarily associating yourself with things that you know people consider cool. That is bogus. That's a put-on. That's a branding technique, and Radiohead have their brand that they're popular and intelligent, so they have a song about Harry Patch." The Fiery Furnace's publicist said that Friedberger confused Harry Patch, the veteran, with Harry Partch, the microtonal composer. Indeed, in the interview Friedberger mockingly asks "Is it 48 notes to the octave?" in reference to Partch's just intonation 43-tone scale. Friedberger defended his reference to the composer as deliberate "fooling around" rather than genuine confusion. In the same statement, Friedberger says he "would have much preferred to insult Beck but he is too afraid of Scientologists"; shortly thereafter, Beck released a song about Harry Partch, which Pitchfork referred to as either "directly related to Friedberger's remarks, or just one hell of a coincidence". Radiohead did not respond to Friedberger's criticisms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Patch_(In_Memory_Of)

separator is a really lovely, appropriate way to close this disc. yes, very strong side-two on this album.