I’ve been listening to the new Radiohead (The King of Limbs). I like it. Some people don’t.
I read an assessment of it that described the songs as simple repetitive rhythmic patterns, with some guitar noodling on top and then Thom Yorke wailing away – the whole thing ending up much higher on atmospherics than on song construction.
Along similar lines, see Matthew Perpetua at Fluxblog:
[It] has its moments of beauty but it mostly rejects pop structure and hooks. It emphasizes rhythm, but its beats often sputter or clang together in awkward ways. It’s heavy on atmosphere and mood, but the mood isn’t especially pleasant. The album mostly evokes the feeling of being a bit out of it on medication for a nasty head cold.
I suppose.
Lots of people miss the old Radiohead, the guitar-driven arena rock style band, with songs like “Creep,” “Fake Plastic Trees,” “Street Spirit (Fade Out),” and “Karma Police.” I only became interested in them after Kid A/Amnesiac, and later went back and listened to the earlier stuff.
What Do I Like
In many ways, I’m a classical pop structuralist. I like A A B A song structure, sweeping choruses, harmony & handclaps. I love Gershwin and the Beatles.
But…
That construction – rhythmic pattern, layered with simple musical line, on top of which a vocalist freestyles – also sounds like hip-hop. And if that sounds like an insult to you, it also describes James Brown and Fela Kuti.
There’s the guitar thing – a bigger topic I’ll need a longer post to get into – but even putting aside the fact that the new album isn’t guitar rock or interested in standard pop structure, I kind of like the jagged edges. I like whacked-out structure.
There’s the chopped & screwed school of hip-hop production from the Nineties. There’s John Oswald’s Plunderphonics approach, which utilizes sampling, but not in a pop-oriented fashion. There’s the post-punk new wave that drew me in during the early Eighties (see here and here), often made by people who could barely play their instruments and sometimes by people determined to break rock ‘n’ roll into little pieces.
“Bloom,” the first cut on The King of Limbs, does have that feeling of a song that’s just barely holding together, about to fall apart, like a car rattling down a bad stretch of road, sounding like it might break down at any second. The next track, “Morning Mr Magpie,” is tight as hell. I’ll grant you, “Feral” sounds more like a sketch of an idea of a song, but then “Give Up the Ghost” is a piece of lovely acoustic pop.
So, as much as I love classic pop, and probably always will, this other material attracts me too. And perhaps that’s why I like the new Radiohead.
UPDATE: For more thoughts on Radiohead, you might want to take a look at a series on Radiohead covers I did back in 2006: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.