Mental Debugs

I have always been a big fan of Thom Yorke, Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, and Phil Selway. Collectively, they are called Radiohead. Musically, I am more drawn to the dreary, verging on the melancholy sound, with vocals and arrangement that sear through the heart and soul. I just want to be swept off my feet and brought to a state of mind that only a handful of musical geniuses could do. This is one reason, too, why I love chillout music, the ambient/downtempo subgenre, and even trance—tunes that give me a different kind of high, without the physical adverse effects—okay, maybe people have chanced upon me rolling up my eyes from pure auricular bliss on the bus. Radiohead’s In Rainbows did that when it was released in 2007. It became an accompaniment on my way home in the wee hours of the morning as I worked for a contact center at that time. So imagine the smile on my face as four years from In Rainbows’ release, we usher in a new Radiohead album. Hear ye all The King of Limbs.

And what better way to welcome the album with Thom Yorke, nonetheless, giving an interpretative dance of his own to the tune of TKOL‘s carrier single Lotus Flower. When I first saw the music video, I wanted to get on my own two left feet and dance with Thom Yorke. His rendition is surely not one you’ll see in competition in shows like So You Think You Can Dance or ABDC but there is something infectious and dramatic with it, especially when one sees the now 4o-something Thom Yorke looking at the camera, inviting oneself to be one with the music of Lotus Flower, and surely of other ear-worthy songs in the eight-track, eight-album offering from the lads of Oxfordshire.

I’d have to say that the last four titles are the ones that hit home best, living up to what I wanted Radiohead to sound, personally at least. From Lotus Flower, the momentum is kept up by succeeding tracks Codex, Give Up The Ghost, and Separator. Sure Bloom, true to its name and form, builds up the expectation a Radiohead fan would have of things to come listening to TKOL . But by the time you reach Feral, you would have thought that this album is nothing but the dreary verging on the melancholy I have come to expect, not until Lotus Flower comes on till we’re left hanging by the Separator, leaving one to clamor for more as an eight-track album is not enough to get your dose of Radiohead music since In Rainbows came to fruition. Tracks one to five didn’t stop me from liking TKOL as a whole, although I know Radiohead fans out there would have loved these as well, but its the last four songs that gave me that searing the heart and soul experience I was talking about and a different kind of high that only Thom Yorke and the gang could give. And I wouldn’t mind getting the occasional eye-rolling physical side effects of listening to a Radiohead album either.