Critics take their time over Radiohead's The King of Limbs

Drowned In Sound has put a mark on The King of Limbs at last, 7 out of 10, averaged from scores its 11 writers had given but not published at the time. Its review went up on 21 February, three days after the album arrived as a download, as a committee of short reactions, introduced as not a real review because the release had come so fast. It promised a proper one for the CD and vinyl. About a month on, Andrzej Lukowski added a note instead, saying he still largely agrees with what the committee wrote. Its writers were far apart. David Edwards called it the band's best record in a decade and the one that would finally split the fans, Sam Walby said it would not be remembered as a classic, and Thom Gibbs and Krystina Nellis both singled out “Feral”.

Stephen Troussé's review for Uncut, online since 7 April, rates “Lotus Flower” as possibly the best standalone track Radiohead have put out since “Paranoid Android”. He thinks eight songs in 37 minutes suits the record, and hears a superb band whose weak point is the words.

Several of the later critics are openly impatient with the first-day verdicts. Wyndham Wyeth argued in Paste on 1 March that a Radiohead record cannot be judged on one listen, recalling that Kid A was savaged in 2000 and topped the decade-end lists, and called the new album a cousin of Kid A and Amnesiac. Wyeth also points out that “Morning Mr Magpie” is not new. The band first played it, fast and on acoustic guitar, in a webcast from their Oxford studio on 18 December 2002, as they finished Hail to the Thief. Chris Karman made it Treble's album of the week nearly three weeks in, still hearing new things in it. He calls it their most difficult album and puts it level with Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief, below The Bends, OK Computer, Kid A and In Rainbows.

Adam Sweeting, in The Arts Desk, says it rarely sounds like a band and could almost be Thom Yorke alone with a MacBook; only “Little by Little” and “Separator” sound to him like musicians in a room. Rob Rodriguez of the University of Iowa station KRUI hears a Yorke solo record in half the album, from the programmed drums, and does not count it against it. Ben Laboy in The Stanford Daily praised Jonny Greenwood's strings on “Codex”, and Mike Wardlaw for V13 calls the last three tracks probably the band's most perfectly executed run of three. Reviler handed the album to four writers, whose scores out of 100 run from 54.1, for songs that are only sketches, to 97, which ranks it with Kid A, OK Computer and In Rainbows.

Tom Mansell, giving it four stars for Digital Spy on 28 March, the day the CD and vinyl came out, notes that the download was labelled TKOL01, which with the closing “Separator” has fans guessing at a second part. At Drowned In Sound, Lukowski jokes that we should be saving ourself for TKOL2¹¹.

The later reviews