I have never heard anyone say that a Radiohead album was bad. They’re probably the most respected group of musicians in the world, and not without good reason. But they do change quite a lot. Not every album is for everybody. Kind of like Kid A, In Rainbows just really didn’t do much for me when it was released. Oh, I recognized it as one of the better albums of the year, but it just wasn’t my thing. The problem was an eight year gap. By 2011, I’d long played all of the others to death. Radiohead had faded from my favorite band in the world to a distant memory–some pleasant reminder of my high school years and nothing more.

So The King of Limbs is pretty much a dream come true. As that kid who always liked Amnesiac more than Ok Computer, what I would have ideally wanted in a new Radiohead album probably doesn’t comply with the average opinion. But I won. The King of Limbs is a return to that smooth, laid back, jazzy side of the band that poked its head out in 2001 and then went into hiding for a decade.

Bloom

It’s pretty hard to talk about what makes any Radiohead album good, but I think I can safely point to the bass effects as The King of Limb’s most dominant feature. The first three tracks are all similarly constructed–short drum loops that vary little over the course of a given song, underpinned by bass sounds that are always looking forward and lending a great deal of flavor to otherwise very repetitive music. There’s a gliding feeling present throughout, like the songs are sliding across ice in perpetual motion. Little electronic bubbles of sound dot the bass progression, lighting the path. You don’t anticipate the destination, you just enjoy the ride. Vague? It’s a Radiohead album. You can only really talk about it in metaphors.

Morning Mr. Magpie

Like any Radiohead album, the track order matters for better or worse, despite being only 37 minutes long. I’m not going to say there’s a definite, intentional progression to it, but everything feels like it’s in the right place to create a well-rounded picture. The first three songs all have this incredibly chill Amnesiac feel to them–the same sort of vibe I get from say, I Might Be Wrong and Dollars and Cents. You can’t necessarily feel a transition coming in Little By Little, but it’s decidedly less dreamy than the first two. If they’re going to make a move, it’s the best one to lead off from. What follows might not be expected though. Feral turns out to be one of those experimental glitchy Radiohead à la Aphex Twin efforts that found some presence in The Gloaming but were otherwise regulated to b-sides starting on the Knives Out and Pyramid Song singles.

Track five, Lotus Flower, returns to elements of the first three songs, but there’s nothing smooth about it. It feels pretty tense if you ask me. Thom’s voice is more longing, an eerie keyboard sneaks in and out of the background, and there’s this kind of creepy clapping hand effect that makes me feel like the whole song is about ready to snap. I haven’t yet convinced myself that I like it, and the span of Feral and Lotus Flower is definitely the weak link of the album for me, but better to keep the tension to the middle than to throw me off at the beginning or end. From track six on it’s a calm ride again.

Codex

Codex, my favorite track, might start out feeling like Pyramid Song, and it has a lot of the same dreamy qualities, but it never picks up. It’s just Thom, a piano, and some minimal mournful effects. What he’s singing is anybody’s guess half the time, and the cd packaging offers no guidance there, but what I looked up put it as “Slight of hand, jump off the end into a clear lake, no one around. / Just dragonflies flying to the side. No one gets hurt. You’ve done nothing wrong. / Slide your hand, jump off the end. The water’s clear and innocent. The water’s clear and innocent.” Simple and beautiful, and the antithesis of the song that precedes it.

The next song, Give Up the Ghost, follows the same trend, replacing minimalistic piano for equally subdued guitar and a backing vocal loop that has a sort of blues feel to me. The two go together perfectly to round out the real meat of the album. I think I’d describe the first seven tracks as gliding forward smoothly, hitting a rocky road, and being content to stand perfectly still and fade away. Then there’s Separator.

Separator

I’m not sure where this song comes from. It feels out of place and yet perfectly fitting, a sort of ending credits. Radiohead have a long tradition of putting the most out of place song at the end, usually with great results, and this is no different. Separator is smooth and upbeat, a lot like the first three songs, but it’s stationary like Give Up the Ghost. Who knows what the band’s getting at here, but it’s suggestive in a lot of ways. It’s a song about waking up. The album is done, the dream is finished, but “if you think this is over with you’re wrong.“. It’s just the separator; there’ll be more to come. Never mind how fatalistic the last two tracks felt, no one is giving up the ghost here.

Radiohead have been around for an awfully long time, but it’s only the brevity of this album that makes it feel like a late-career effort to any extent. It’s difficult to rate the quality in comparison to other Radiohead albums because of the lack of quantity, but it’s excellent in its own right. If anything it feels more like Radiohead in their prime to me than In Rainbows did (if I can call that 1997-2003 without much debate), but it also demands a more timely follow-up than they’ve been offering lately. I’m sure if you already like Radiohead you don’t require any convincing to check this one out, but I especially recommend it to my fellow Amnesiac fans.