Be forewarned: There is nothing acoustic about this feature. Why not, you ask? Well, we have other interests.. don’t you?

The King of Limbs: the album everyone is talking about. The album you’re obligated to have an opinion about, unless you’re a Christopher McCandless protégé, and your plan involves leaving it all behind for a short and lonely life in the Alaskan wild.

Much of what has been said about Radiohead’s new cut is highly critical, and not unfairly so – there is plenty to be critical about. This album almost completely lacks the technical virtuosity and compositional boldness of OK Computer (and even, one could argue, to a lesser but still significant extent Kid A and Hail to the Thief). There is no single track that breaks ground in quantifiable ways, no obvious standard the way there was Paranoid Android, no masterpiece hidden in plain sight like How to Disappear Completely.

And yet The King of Limbs is just what we’ve come to expect from Radiohead: brilliant, destined for decades of replay and analysis, a landmark, a statement of our times. One might even say that it is the flagship of a newly coined sub-genre we can call “post-pop” (or has that label, like every other, already been taken?) – a self-conscious critique of pop culture, a parody of its most ludicrous and indulgent components with a simultaneous embrace of its redeeming qualities.

This is best exemplified by the album’s first single, the first song most people heard and the only released with a video, Lotus Flower. On the surface, it’s pretty conventional Fourth Wave Radiohead (i.e. Pablo Honey->OK Computer->Kid A and Amnesiac with some transitional identity confusion around the time of Hail to the Thief->In Rainbows and The King of Limbs) – an ostinato bass line, modulating occasionally to fuel the melody which is original yet memorable, with dark, borderline indecipherable lyrics painting a vague picture of conflict, whether internal or interpersonal is impossible to tell.

To understand this song, one should begin with the video, which features a fedora-clad Thom Yorke spastically dancing alone in a back-lit warehouse. Ludicrous though it may seem, the intensity of Yorke’s performance is in large part genuine. At the very least, it reflects the unapologetically idiosyncratic intensity he brings to everything he does. It also matches the pulsating feel of the music playing which, as Radiohead (among precious few others) so often does, defies the neat mood-based categorizations we like to impose on music: sad, happy, pensive, ecstatic, angry, calm, lovesick, defiant.

Of course, it’s not meant to be taken entirely seriously (a fact which, admittedly, didn’t dawn on me until my second viewing – you can imagine my initial amusement). The objective, it seems clear, is parody – plain and simple. One man in a simple costume dancing alone in an empty warehouse before two stationary cameras is an unambiguous joke at the expense of plastic pop-producers with “fast-ballooning heads,” not to mention production and promotion budgets. (The “©Radiohead” at the video’s conclusion drives home the point with an emphatic “Eff you, record labels!”) When you consider that “Lotus Flower” is the name of at least two other modern pop songs – including one by Blackalicious – the message, illustrated in particular by the goofy dancing, becomes crystal clear.

A look at the arc of pop-music history suggests that this trend – the development of an almost Dadaist sensibility as a sub-genre – was all but inevitable from the outset. The 1980s produced the first pop stars who were truly modern in a sense that Generation Y-ers can understand, and by carving that niche into entertainment culture, they and their producers taught us what kind of star we want, what we really, really want. With that model to emulate, teeny-boppers and alt-pop-rockers (almost always with inferior talent) rode the originators’ coattails into the new millennium and, to a degree, up to today.

The latter half of the last decade, though, has seen a rebellion against cutting musical cookies and a renewed emphasis on creativity and originality even in pop. The incorporation of indie music into the mainstream reflects this, as does the meteoric rise of Lady Gaga, the self-styled performance artist (and I don’t mean just musical performance) who knows exactly what her largely oblivious audience needs to stay happy, and gives it to them with a smile and a peep up her meat-dress. But it’s Radiohead that really has their fingers on the pulse of popular entertainment, and as the band with arguably the greatest crossover appeal of the last two decades, they’re best positioned to do something about it.

All this may strike some as insufferable pretentiousness and others as plot-thickening intrigue – both opinions likely formed long before reading this review, and long before hearing this album. Regardless of which camp one falls into, though, it’s worth noting that Radiohead isn’t quite so vain as to see their music as the high-artistic antidote to creatively bankrupt pop. Though their catalogue is indeed peppered with moments of genuine creative brilliance – transcendence, even – in this instance they carry the air of satire, not superiority. This is a group not interested in rising above the messy pop-cultural fray, and it couldn’t if it tried. Their middle-aged ambition, having apparently satisfied their adolescent impulse toward experimentation and progressive composition, seems to be the cautious embrace of the flavor of the week, at least enough to provide an authentic internal critique of it. I take the nonsensically scrambled final verse in Lotus Flower to be a sly *wink* to this effect.

In any case, the album isn’t completely – or even primarily – a statement of any kind, and Radiohead does take their work and their product seriously enough to treat it like just another album, which at the end of the day is precisely what it is. And in fact, The King of Limbs is a lot like its immediate predecessor, In Rainbows, if the latter had terrible memory loss (get it? Amnesiac?). Codex, like a hybrid between Videotape (In Rainbows) and Pyramid Song (Amnesiac) – and every bit as beautiful – is perhaps the best example of this. For the rest, give the record a spin and see for yourself.

Radiohead – Codex by theacousticversion-1

Radiohead – Morning Mr. Magpie by theacousticversion-1