The King of Limbs is an ancient oak tree hidden deep in the Savernake Forest of Wiltshire, England. It’s said to be older than England itself, and few people actually know its exact location. Those few people may include Thom Yorke, lead singer of Radiohead, who named the band’s newest album after the aging behemoth. Radiohead has always explored the theme of isolation in their music, but their recent work has only done so in the context of a rapidly modernizing world. The meticulous and intricate In Rainbows did this best of all their prior albums, with Yorke’s painful longing for human intimacy coming through in songs like All I Need and Nude. But in The King of Limbs, Thom Yorke finally dives deep into the ethereal qualities of nature, a place that can be hauntingly lonely and yet strangely fulfilling. The result is a fragile and beautiful work of art, one much more subtle and graceful than In Rainbows. It’s a conceptual triumph, but by no means an easy listen.
The opening half of the album is busy and muddled, and runs by in less than 20 minutes. Vocals fade in and out between the calls of trumpets in Bloom, provoking a transcendent image of quiet dawn. However, the persistent percussion firmly anchors the listener from drifting off into the atmosphere with Yorke’s voice. When the drumbeat finally quiets down at the end of the song, it’s hard not to feel a sense of relief. The first half of the album fully investigates this tension between natural flux and artificial rhythm. Little by Little almost sounds like something you could tango to, if Yorke wasn’t singing about how “Routines and schedules…drug and kill you” over the groovy melody. Feral and Morning Mr Magpie share the fast pace and airy background of an enjoyable dubstep remix, but are barely noticeable in the larger context of the album.
The last four songs of this album are looser and unveil an organic side of Radiohead barely seen in earlier albums. In Lotus Flower, Yorke stops crooning and starts spouting mellow hippie poetry that’s so catchy even he can’t stop dancing to it. The drums come to a full stop in Codex, the crown jewel of this album. As a repeated set of piano chords perfectly frame Yorke’s story of spiritual rebirth in water “clear and innocent,” we finally feel as if we are fully immersed in the woodlands. This almost medieval use of nature as a source of moral symbolism is refreshing, and gives way to a cleverly faded-in sample of chirping birds. These birds carry on into the next track, Giving up the Ghost. It’s a treat: an earthy tune with a simple acoustic refrain so good it could be missing from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s So Far. In the final track of the album, Seperator, Yorke’s vocals are all over the place and his voice distorted beyond recognition. Perhaps that’s the point; Yorke might as well be singing miles away from us as he wanders through a forest. The album comes to an end and only the faint echoes of his voice are audible as we are quite unwillingly pulled back to our dreary lives.
The King of Limbs is passionate in its abstraction. Though you will not find candy-coated hooks and refrains, Yorke succeeds in creating something completely different from his previous albums. The startling freshness of this album is in part explained by the comments of Radiohead’s cover artist, Stanley Donwood, who described how his inspiration for this album’s artwork was derived from “something about the northern European imagination, in the sense of all our fairy stories and mythical creatures, they all come from the woods – Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel & Gretel.” Today fairy tales are more necessary than ever, and yet rarer than ever. Somehow, Radiohead managed to wander into a forest untouched for more than a thousand years and come back with an exquisite musical meditation on the absence of nature from our lives.
