Radiohead's New Album Is One Of Their Best And No I'm Not Crazy

The thesis statement is in the title so I'm not even gonna bother with an introductory paragraph.

Look, I know what you're thinking: the new one sounds half-assed and Anthony's just being contradictory for the sheer hell of it. Well, it isn't and I'm not. And believe me, I'm almost as baffled by my own reaction as you are. Almost.

Here's the thing, though (or what I believe to be the... erm... thing). Having only gotten into Radiohead somewhere in the last six years, I've had nearly every Radiohead album pre-hyped for me as an all-caps "LIFE-CHANGING EXPERIENCE". A lot of the time with Radiohead, my heightened expectations mean the things I would brush off as minor quibbles with any other band become huge sore points for me, and I recognize that I'm totally at fault for expecting perfection straight out of the gate.

Of course, I am gonna nitpick, just a little bit. OK Computer (still their masterpiece in many ways) was an exhilarating synthesis of influences and ideas, but when broken down, its components are blatantly and almost irritatingly derivative. Airbag IS the midsection of Red by King Crimson, Karma Police IS Sexy Sadie by The Beatles, Lucky IS Breathe by Pink Floyd... and so on. It's the kind of thing that seems like a charming tip of the hat if done sparingly, but makes you seriously question a band's songwriting abilities if spread across a whole album. Even at their most experimental, they seem to be taking obvious cues from other bands, and that bothers me a bit.

This is similar to a problem I have with Pink Floyd, the band Radiohead most closely resembles. People will regularly prattle on about how "deep" Pink Floyd's lyrics are, when really what Pink Floyd (or, more often than not, chief lyricist/group tyrant Rogert Waters) do is simplify grand philosophical concepts in a way that everyone can understand. Yes, the concepts are "deep", but they way they're writing about them isn't. It's not to say that there isn't something to commend about bringing these concepts to the masses, but praise for a second-hand concept is still due to the person you borrowed it from... and so it goes with Radiohead. You can praise them for their originality all you want, but what you're really praising is their own admittedly excellent taste in source material.

It's not entirely their fault, to be fair. They didn't ask for OK Computer and Kid A to be hailed as world-changing milestones. One of the things that annoys me about my own profession as a rock critic is how we're always looking to evaluate things on a cultural level as well as a musical one. As soon as an artist records something we deem a masterpiece, they now have something they have to spend the rest of their careers living up to, in spite of the fact that any greater meaning to the music was usually applied after the fact. What I do respect about Radiohead is that, in spite of how often they come off as comically earnest, chin-stroking artiste types, they've always seemed genuinely unconcerned with this. In fact, it seems they've done everything in their power to avoid being hailed as the biggest band in the world, be it through their deliberately cryptic public image or their abject refusal to play ball with the press and the record companies (okay, that's sort of the same thing, but you get my drift).

Well, with this latest album, it seems they've finally gotten their wish. They have now released their shortest, starkest-sounding album to a resounding "WTF". The band that made their reputation in pushing boundaries has finally found a way to push people in the entirely wrong direction.

Only I'm not one of them. Yes, I'm finally going to try and justify why I've come to love King Of Limbs, and I think it's more than just my own reduced expectations. I feel like on this album, more than any other, Radiohead are just goofing around, trying things out, and above all, not getting ahead of themselves. Their previous release, In Rainbows, was the first example of this more casual, down-to-earth approach, but it was still in support of some of the most conventional-sounding songs they'd ever written. Here, they've unleashed their most jarring and abstract set of compositions yet, seemingly just for the sheer hell of it. Some would see this as a lazier approach, but I feel like the spontaneity with which they imbue these strange little songs makes this the first truly experimental record they've ever made (as opposed to Kid A and Amnesiac, which, for all their surface "weirdness" were actually very studied and methodical in their re-purposing of avant-garde electronica).

Not everything on this album works, but I feel like that's besides the point. Whether you love or hate the album, it essentially boils down to the exact same reason: they aren't trying so hard anymore. Depending on why you listen to Radiohead, that's either a huge relief or a profound disappointment. No points for guessing which camp I'm in.