I think that reviewing a Radiohead album is an inherently futile effort; it’s like trying to throw a bucket of water on a forest fire. Their music is dense, multi-layered, cryptic—listening is a venture into erudition, which means that it can be hard to like. The first time I listened to them in high school, my reaction was more WTF than obsessive admiration. A year later, after persistent rumors of their excellence, I revisited them with their most recent album at the time, In Rainbows- apparently the most accessible album they’d produced, both musically and financially (Radiohead released In Rainbows independent of a record label and allowed customers to purchase the album on the band’s website at whatever price they wished.).

Now I’m attempting a review at their newest album, The King of Limbs. I guess that’s evidence enough that I had a swing of opinion.

I haven’t justified my first sentence yet, though. A review of Radiohead’s music is futile because it cannot be comprehensive, perhaps not even accurate. A music review advocates an interpretation of a set of songs, and then the reader can listen through the lens of this interpretation. I don’t think that this functions in the context of a Radiohead album. Listening is an intensely personal and variable experience— lead vocalist Thom Yorke has said that he chooses his lyrics more for the way the words complement the mood of the song than for their thematic or poetic purpose, which makes every listen distinct. My review, then, is a reflection on what I heard in The King of Limbs today, a personal fashioning of meaning from a shifting, mutable piece of art.

The album opens with “Bloom,” where a keyboard begins as if introducing a dream sequence, and then fades into the background as two alternating, dissonant, disconcerting notes. The song’s main beat pulses and broods, and the snare drums are loud and rhythmic. Yorke sings, “And while the ocean blooms, it’s what keeps me alive…I’m moving out of orbit, turning in somersaults,” which is what the song does to me—the track floods and pulls me into the rest of the album.

In the fifth track, “Lotus Flower,” Yorke’s vocals are foregrounded for the first time in the album. He sings in his signature falsetto while a distorted drum, muted bass line (carrying the song’s rhythm), and futuristic synthesizer blend with his voice. If the album is a ghostly, ethereal dream, then this track is the height of the dream world, which Yorke’s prominence (he’s most actively involved in “the dream” here) and lyrics signal. He sings, “Slowly we unfold/ As lotus flowers/…All I want is the moon upon a stick…/The darkness is beneath.” While the song is upbeat, its sound and lyrics are still haunting, distorted, and heavy. The fact that it is upbeat serves more to suggest chaos than to uplift, as Yorke “dance[s] around the pit.”

From here, the album’s final two tracks, “Give Up the Ghost” and “Separator,” show the dreamer beginning to wake up from the nightmare. In “Give Up the Ghost,” back-up vocalists sing, “Don’t haunt me/Don’t hurt me,” and Yorke sings, “I think I have had my fill…/I think I should give up the ghost,” and the introduction of an acoustic guitar to the album’s palette of sounds in the song accentuates this sense of emergence—it’s not as brooding as the electric guitar and synthesizers used in previous tracks. “Separator” sees Yorke sing, “It’s like I’ve fallen out of bed from a long and vivid dream,” and the dissonance that I’ve grown accustomed to throughout the album is nearly nonexistent; the song has a very harmonious and pleasant sound. However, the song concludes with “If you think this is over, then you’re wrong…/Wake me up,” with sounds and words growing increasingly ambiguous and unstructured. How Radiohead of Radiohead: the haunting doesn’t stop in the morning, and I’m left with the incomprehensibility that I started with. 

Check out the whole album. If you don’t want to do that, definitely get “Codex,” “Lotus Flower,” and “Give Up the Ghost.”