“King of Limbs is boring.” That’s a popular refrain regarding Radiohead’s briefly-anticipated LP, already a polarizing album less than a week after its release. Lacking the band’s trademark dynamism, Limbs shows Radiohead in rare, understated form. Taking this approach now is strategic—with Arcade Fire as the new bombastic fearmongers for the smarter-than-you set, it sets the group up to brush off accusations of dullness: “We meant for this to be a mellow record, it’s you who doesn’t get it.”
But this implication skips over a lot of things. It misses that Radiohead’s technophobic, postmodern paranoia was already outdated when they turned to sales gimmicks to remain relevant with 2007’s In Rainbows (a tactic half-heartedly replicated by Limbs’ brief marketing cycle). It misses that their humorless, impersonal aesthetic is at odds with contemporary trends in both popular and independent music. And it misses that their brand of watered-down electronica for rockists does little justice to the more daring musicians they pilfer from.
It is the last point that’s most irritating. When Radiohead was the biggest rock band in the world in the late 1990s and early 2000s—a time when such a crown existed—it was exciting and unexpected to hear them draw from the style of experimental dance label Warp Records (as on Kid A and Amnesiac). In 2011, however, that same appropriating is disappointing. The group isn’t blazing new trails; they’re picking up on last year’s trends from the electronic scene—Ricardo Villalobos’s pensive microhouse, Four Tet’s stuttering minimalism, and Warp’s intelligent dance music. Even the biggest fan of pastiche has to admit that Radiohead has been standing on the shoulders of far more interesting musicians far too long to warrant their continued reputation as a standard-bearer for experimentation.
The biggest irony of all, though, is that Radiohead never ceases to sound like Radiohead. No matter which high-brow influences the band claims on a particular release—The Beatles and post-classical composer Olivier Messiaen on Hail to the Thief; German electronic label Kompakt and krautrock act Neu on In Rainbows—the band is by and large doling out the same tactics they were on 1997’s groundbreaking OK Computer. When they seem content with merely being themselves—as on the delicate, unassuming “Separator” that closes Limbs—Radiohead can be downright delightful. But when they so clearly work to make enlightened rock music, becoming curators of taste and thought rather than manipulators of melody and emotion, it brings to mind something else about monarchs and body parts: the emperor has no clothes.
Voice’s Choices: “Separator”
