The King of Limbs - First Listen

The King of Limbs – First Listen Notes
By Talley M. Berry


Bloom (D minor): Not, to me, a terribly impressive opener. There is one cool moment of coalescence just before the lyrics enter, when the respective rhythms of the separate parts become entangled and the meter is slightly obscured. Modal, rather than chord-progression-based (simple i-iv, or D minor-G minor throughout). Interesting beat. Thom's voice is meatier than I've heard it before. Lots of electronic drums.

Morning Mr. Magpie (C minor): Nice groove, sounds a lot like some other Radiohead, maybe especially Hail to the Thief’s “Go to Sleep.” Modal again (Dorian – a minor scale with a raised six represents the usable notes). Scale degrees 5-5-5-1 in the bass reflects the lack of harmonic changes. Not very brave, I don’t think, but a very listenable and cool-sounding song. Sinuous bridge section may include fleeting VI and iv chords, but it is basically just decoration of a looong C minor chord, like the rest of the song. The percussion, as usual, is fast, driven, and not played by a human.

Little By Little (D minor): F F E D G G F# D Bb Bb A D C C B D riff is cool in D. Plus harmony on top of it also with modal mixture. Pretty cool. It could be argued that the chord progression goes III-i-IV-i-VI-i-VII-1, but I think it is more clearly just embellishments on a constant D minor chord (like the MMM bridge). Wild lilting percussion churns away nonstop like a paper press or a busy slum. The bridge is interesting. It modulates to the subdominant (G minor) and progresses i-VI-V6 (V in first inversion)-V, repeating a few times before returning to the home key. After the bridge, the bass mostly peddles a D, but a D-Bb-C-D (i-VI-VII-i) progression can be made out over it. Little By Little has a great sound overall.

Feral (G minor): More frantic electronic percussion and simple synthed intervals (scale degrees 1 and 5, then 5 and 5). Surprising interjection of synthed voice (?) is cool and introduces a sweet bass line. Again juxtaposition of the raised and lowered third scale degree (in the bass line) becomes a recurring theme, especially at the end. Specifically, the bass-line goes 4-2-3-1 in scale degrees, but the 3 is sometimes a half-step above the 2, and sometimes a whole-step.

Lotus Flower (D minor): Simple minor pentatonic riffing interspersed with major IV chords (another experiment in modality, this time Dorian-focused). Pretty bridge, VI and iv chords, but still very electronica-synthesized. Beautiful vocals. Thom in his element.

Codex (D minor): strange beginning but then...what's this? A piano! VII-VI-1-1. Very pretty. Beautiful singing and then a lovely, short modulation to the relative major on "Dragonflies". Cool flat 5th scale degree seems to herald something new on "ooh" at 2:17 and then resolves down to form the 5th of the VII chord. Beautiful texture from horns and piano around the 3-minute mark (lots of seconds). Strange (III with a flat 5) chord shortly after – the song is in D minor, so the notes are F, A and B, with the top two also violin-trilled above. “Codex” is about nature, I think, and leads straight into...

Give Up the Ghost (D major): vocal harmony and guitars! Slow I-v (that's major one and minor five) progression, which we've seen before in "The Tourist" (and recently Paramore's "The Only Exception," if that helps). The minor v chord is often prepared by an early C natural, which makes the preceding chord really a D major-minor seventh chord. When the title lyrics arrive, I is replaced by vii, which leads to a IIIb7 (major seventh chord built on the flat third scale degree of F, since we are in D again), which resolves down a fourth to VIIb, which steps up to return home to D major. A pretty moment.

Separator (Bb major): The chord progression that persists throughout is I-v, which I think I’ve heard somewhere before…oh, right, the previous song. “Separator” is sparsely orchestrated enough (with bass riffing, drums jamming, and a guitar playing a Bb on the downbeat of every measure) that it is not really clear sometimes whether the intention is I-v or I-VII, but the bass finds scale-degree 5 enough to make it clear that it is usually I-v. However, a I-VII-IV progression sneaks in from time to time. This is a pretty one. Thom sings well throughout and Colin supplies a powerful, grooving bass-line.


I have all my Radiohead music filed under “Rock” in iTunes. The King of Limbs begs to be left where its coding automatically puts it: Alternative. I’ve only listened to it once, and I’m sure my opinions on it will change drastically, but my impression is that it may not be as strong as In Rainbows was.
Harmonically, it is very simple; it doesn’t have the terrific chords that songs like “Paranoid Android” and “Exit Music” have. Fast chord changes don’t necessarily make good music; we know the success Miles Davis discovered when he moved away from the lightning harmonic progressions of Bebop and produced Kind of Blue, but TKOL feels more complacent than visionary. It also doesn’t feature much instrumental virtuousity, perhaps a product of Radiohead’s obsession with making music electronically.
So what is there to appreciate? Well, it is pretty. Thom Yorke sings beautifully, and I’m sure the lyrics are good (I mostly ignored them the first time through). Some of the songs make me wonder at their beauty, while others make me want to dance. Each song has special moments that make it more than a club song, but a couple of them are almost pure grooves. What Radiohead do best on this album is produce rich, powerful sounding songs (often with hot beats); the underlying content is what falls short.
There are interesting musical ideas, though. The relationship between a major chord and a minor chord a fourth beneath seems to be a theme. “Lotus Flower” is based on minor i chords and major IV chords, while both “Give Up the Ghost” and “Separator” repeat the I-v progression throughout. It is a cool sound, but it is nothing new. As I noted above, I-v has even crept into bad popular music since Brahms famously used a minor v chord in his Requiem.
On this album, it is part of a larger trend of altered notes, especially scale degrees 3, 6, and 7. “Morning Mr. Magpie” employs the raised 6th scale degree, while both “Little By Little” and “Feral” mix raised and lowered 3rd scale degrees. The major IV chord in “Lotus Flower” is an example of a raised 6th scale degree in a minor key, while the main chord progression in “Give Up the Ghost” and “Separator” relies on a lowered 7th scale degree. Codex displays two examples of a lowered 5th scale degree (which also happen to be lowered fifths in the chords in which they respectively appear) – once in the home key of D minor (the “ooh” part), and once in the relative major (F) as part of the surprising F-A-B chord.
The beautiful sound, modal mixture and accidentals present in TKOL would be hard to find in the music of any other popular artist. Radiohead have proven, though, that their music can simultaneously rock out and be harmonically adventurous. I’ll probably change my mind later, but on first listen, it seems to me that this album doesn’t do either at the level we expect from them.