Are We Going to Pretend the New Radiohead Isn’t Boring?

February 21, 2011 | | 3 Comments

The King of LimbsWe’ll go ahead and answer that rhetorical in the headline right now: Nope. We’re not going to pretend. The King of Limbs is boring, it’s true.

The question about what makes one piece of art good and another bad is a huge one. There’s subjectivity on the part of the artist and the receiver. There’s historical context. There’s the entire construct of language. All kinds of stuff comes into play. Many serious art critics won’t even go there. Rather than trying to decide whether a work of art is good or bad, they ask: Is it interesting?

It’s a dodge of sorts, since deciding something is interesting falls into many of the same traps as deciding something is good, but at least the critic doesn’t have to deal with all the theological and philosophical ramifications of Good with an upper-case G. As far we know, Plato and St. Thomas Aquinas never wrote tracts on What Is Interesting.

The new Radiohead album is not interesting. There’s nothing new, nothing fresh, nothing really going on here. Just eight tracks of bland ambient music. We listened to them in the car. We listened to them on our computer. In headphones while jogging. On the stereo at home. We’re listening to the final track right now, and we’re going to play The King of Limbs again once this five-minute slice of boring comes to an end.

The only place we can imagine this album working is in a sushi bar, lightly pumped over the speakers while men in long-sleeved shirts and women in short, slinky dresses drink sake and suck the salt off edamame. We’re not saying that would make the album any less boring. But it could be good mood music for the moment.

They are no highs, no lows, and even worse, we’ve heard this all before. All eight tracks sound like blander versions of the palette-cleansing songs on OK Computer, Kid A and In Rainbows — you know, the songs that are okay but really just help reset the mood for tracks that are more rockin’, more meaningful, more melodic.

Too bad there’s none of those here.

The only interesting part of The King of Limbs is the way the band basically just came out and said, Oh hey, we’ve got a new album, we’re releasing it this week, and boom, here it is. Matching the pay-what-you-want buzz of In Rainbows would probably be impossible — such is the price of awesomeness — but we do give Thom Yorke and company credit for releasing The King of Limbs five days after announcing its existence.

You can do that kind of thing when you’re Radiohead. People are going to talk about the album no matter what you do. No matter how boring it might be.







  • Sad

    Well, I totally agree.

    I guess I need to just give up hope that Radiohead will ever return to their roots. In Rainbows has a few tepid moments of rock, and I had held out hope that perhaps we would see more movement in that direction.

    But these guys aren’t even the same people who made The Bends and OK Computer. These guys are really boring. Lots of bands make boring music. It’s a shame to say that Radiohead makes boring music now. But that’s the way it is.

    Thom Yorke captured such a spark with those two albums, and then it seemed instead of risking to to recapture it and failing he simply decided never to try for it at all, probably much against the wishes of his bandmates.

    So many musicians have tried to recapture the magic of The Bends and OK Computer since then, isn’t it sort of sad that the musicians who probably had the best chance of recapturing that magic never tried?

    On those two albums, Thom Yorke’s lyrics had something to say. Looking back now at all releases since OK Computer, I can’t really think of a single song where he seemed to have anything really to say. Maybe he said all he had to say in those two great albums, but even if he doesn’t have any truly great lyrics left, I’m to the point of just wanting him to revisit his old themes that he executed so well.

    (sigh)

    It sucks when the people you love don’t exist anymore but are still alive as different, diminished people.

  • Mjosephsen

    this article blows

  • Henry Guariglia

     It’s not bad. It’s not their best. People that get stuck on one Radiohead album need to move on. Isn’t the thing that makes them great is that they always deliver what you least expect. Sorry “Sad” british trad rock is over. We live in the sad reality of over sensitive indie shit folk. This album is alright. If it were released by any other band than Radiohead it would be hailed. Funny how this band released creep almost twenty years ago. Horrible song. You have to admire their long jevity and evolution. King of Limbs would be a masterpiece by any other band but it’s not up to the standards Radiohead has set for themselves…or their fans have set for them. Maybe this album was meant to defy the odds, A Radiohead album that doesn’t innovate or impress. Just musicians doing what they do with class….