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New Radiohead album releasedthis Saturday

Radiohead will release their eighth album The King of Limbs this Saturday, February 19th.

The band today posted a link on their website to thekingoflimbs.com, where instructions to pre-order the album are given.

A pre-order for a digital-only download costs £6.00 (approx $9.50) for MP3 or £9.00 (approx $14.00) for a CD quality uncompressed WAV file.

The King Of Limbs is also being presented as “the world’s first Newspaper Album”, where for an extra charge, customers receive:

•Two clear 10” vinyl records in a purpose-built record sleeve.
•A compact disc.
•Many large sheets of artwork, 625 tiny pieces of artwork and a full-colour piece of oxo-degradeable plastic to hold it all together.
•The Newspaper Album comes with a digital download that is compatible with all good digital media players.
•The Newspaper Album will be shipped on Monday 9th May 2011 you can, however, enjoy the download on Saturday 19th February 2011.
•One lucky owner of the digital version of The King Of Limbs, purchased from this website, will receive a signed 2 track 12” vinyl.

The unprecedented release comes over three years after the band’s award winning seventh album In Rainbows, which was released in a similar manner.

Now breathe and pray that they really are ‘on target’ for an Australian tour

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Comments

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38008
grattan

grattan said on the 17th Feb, 2011

Gold - first review of the new Radiohead record on Vice:

1. INTRO 1
Johnny Greenwood’s lush orchestral opener contains virtually no words, except for a brief refrain at the end, where Thom intones over and over in his most morose vocal: “War. Killed. Me. I. Died. In. A. Big. War.”

2. INTRO 2 (INTO THE BATTERY FARM)
“Babies’ eyes/Babies’ eyes/cancer, flies, thyroid pies,” laments Thom, on this beastly overture, reminiscent of “The National Anthem”, or perhaps “Killer Cars”, while Johnny Greenwood plays a timpani with a zither as though the planet’s alternative fuel options depended on it.

3. P£T£R P£PP£R
The first of the tracks that Radiohead composed by riffing over whatever was playing on Fearne Cotton’s Live Lounge during that day then erasing the original track, “P£T£R P£PP£R” is Thom’s deeply personal reaction to the events of the banking crisis. It is an angry rant at the 12% per annum depreciation in the value of his Oxford mansion over the past three years, for which he holds Sir Fred Goodwin personally responsible, juxtaposing the dramatic collapse of RBS and a local tableau of his house-selling circumstances.
Key lyric: “Cardboard boxes/Files for the shredder/Did Foxtons call, hon?/End of my tether.”

4. THE OBSERVER
Where would the ‘world’s first newspaper album’ be without the ‘world’s first newspaper song’? An interlude similar to “Fitter, Happier…” in which Victoria Coren’s Observer columns are read chronologically by the late WWI Tommy, Harry Patch, over a nine minute slice of “Bieber 800%”.

5. TAILBACK ON THE LUNAR EXPRESS
Radiohead’s most challenging composition yet. Consisting in its totality of a single note on an acoustic guitar played in a metronomic four beats to the bar, it reputedly took the group two years just to build the studio set-up that would allow them to create the perfect take, during which time Nigel Godrich had three nervous breakdowns and began hallucinating that he was a tick on the rump of Aztec king Montezuma.

6. RAPE ALARM
Like “Nude” on In Rainbows, this is Radiohead stripped bare: a song that will send goose-shivers up your spine, down your aorta, straight into your left ventricle, killing you. Only play if you’re on statins and have a BMI of less than 25.

7. CREEP II
A Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps-style updating of the material that first won them fame, “Creep II” is a tender ballad that finds the same character approaching middle-age, reflecting on his traumatic unrequited love, looking her up on Facebook, then expressing a high degree of schadenfreude in finding out that she’s fat, newly divorced from her jock asshole high school sweetheart, working in a call center for EDF Energy in Stratford, and lists Amy McDonald and The Beatles as her favorite musicians.

8. CALLS WILL COST £1 PLUS STANDARD RATE. CALLS FROM MOBILES MAY BE CONSIDERABLY MORE
A hurricane scree of “Idioteque” electronic noise and acid jazz with a bassline sampled from the Fat Albert theme-tune and replayed on a baguette, over which Thom spits his most barbed lyrical darts yet.
Key lyric: “Louis/Liar. Cheryl/Chernobyl. Dannii/Dachau. Simon/Srebrenica. Pouty face/Cross face. Backstory/Sob story. Red tops/Top off. Best bits/Montage. Black one/Gay one/Old one/Comedy one. Vote me off/Lead me on/Put. Me. Down.”

9. FML
A clear marker that the Oxford quintet have been keeping pace with the most cutting-edge music of the 20th Century, this is a gloopy, ethereal noisespace that sounds like Burial jamming with M. Ward in a nightbus at the bottom of the Thames on a mixing desk made of ennui and marmalade. Lyrically, the Iraq Inquiry comes under Thom’s microscope as he contrasts Tony Blair’s testimony with the sex scenes glimpsed in his memoir, A Journey, and directly addresses Cheri Blair.
Key lyric: “Mrs, how did your huge mouth kiss his lips that lied?/Did you moan as the Iraqi children cried?”

10. OUTRO II (INTRO)
As a stuttering, almost tango beat builds from wafts of diaphanous electronic noise in the background, three minor chords ring out insistently on a grand piano, and a single cello etches a heartbreakingly rich, redolent tattoo of warm, regretful passions, over which Thom Yorke sings about how much he loves pussy.
Key lyric: “Pussy. Pussy. Pussy/Slurp. Slurp. Slurp.
Slap dat, lick dat, split dat, spit dat.
Girl your coochie get so moist/I ain’t got no other choice.
Big ones small ones fat ones thin ones/Don’t give a fuck/Long as I’m in one.”

Instant verdict?
Another classic: one that marries the taut electronica of Pablo Honey with the anthemic Britpop belters of Kid A and the complex prog of The Bends. A radical reinvention that fuses timeless langour with post-modern darkness over towering ziggurat electronica. It is a quantum leap; in the sense that it transplants you inside the body of a West Virginia stripper in 1967 who has to solve her brother’s murder with the help of a computer called Ziggy. Innovative use of physical product… saving record industry… blah… reluctant stars… contrarians… pioneers… Godrich, their fifth Beatle… still ahead of the curve… blah shellfish… Glastonbury… picnic… shoes… bus… car crashes… Global warning… more than just an album… etc.

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