'the king of limbs' is radiohead's successor to 2007's game-changing 'in rainbows'. once again it's produced by nigel godrich and the eight tracks pulse with energy and atmosphere right from the opening jittery rhythms of 'bloom'. percussive, groovy, spacious, ethereal and melodic, this is late night radiohead, a stoned, somnambulistic wander through the urban wastelands shared by such post-dubstep adventurers as burial and james blake. taking the tender intimacy of radiohead classics like 'no surprises' and 'fake plastic trees' and cross fertilising them with elements of world music, jazz and ambient, the result is the kind of chill out music that keeps you awake. highly strung and instinctively contrary, but also deeply harmonically musical, radiohead somehow finds a space between the sinister and the beautiful, the tense and the meditative. they remain masters of musical dichotomy.
