Critics split on Radiohead's The King of Limbs but agree on “Codex”

The critics who reviewed The King of Limbs in its first week are far apart on the album and close together on “Codex”, the slow piano ballad with brass and strings. musicOMH, Clash, Fact, American Songwriter and others name it the best or the most characteristic track, and Pitchfork, NME, DIY and musicOMH each compare it to “Pyramid Song”.

Radiohead put the album out as a download from their own site on 18 February, a day earlier than announced, and critics got it when everyone else did. Some of the first reviews were written within hours, several on a single hearing. Arnold Pan at PopMatters says the surprise forced critics everywhere into verdicts before they were ready, and passes on Chuck Klosterman's joke on Twitter that the band must be upset, since they so plainly make records to be heard once on a laptop at 9:20 in the morning. Pan's 9/10 is the highest score of the week, level with the four and a half stars out of five from DIY.

Mark Pytlik gave it 7.9 at Pitchfork and predicts it will go down as Radiohead's most divisive record. At eight tracks and 37 minutes it is their first album under 40 minutes, somewhere between a full-length and an EP, and Pytlik recalls Thom Yorke telling The Believer in August 2009, None of us want to get into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again²⁸.

Luke Lewis gave it 7/10 in NME, calling it the band's most ambient album, with Jonny Greenwood barely there as a guitarist, and a record to respect for its craft rather than love. It stands to In Rainbows, he says, as Amnesiac stood to Kid A, and is thin after more than three years away. Further down, NOW in Toronto split in two on release day, Kevin Hegge calling it outstanding and Benjamin Boles finding few real songs in it; Boles's full review gave it two Ns out of five. At Cokemachineglow, Mark Abraham said the warmest of his colleagues would go no higher than 72, and called the album redundant.

Several critics take it as two halves. John Murphy at musicOMH finds the first four tracks tense and the last four richer, Jamie Milton at DIY prefers the second half too, and Nitsuh Abebe at Vulture takes the eight songs as two EPs laid end to end. Within hours of release a rumour had it that the eight tracks were only the first part of something larger, often tied to the closing “Separator”; several of the reviews mention it, and Beats Per Minute calls it baseless. The Michigan Daily, a student paper, wanted more anyway, and was sorry to see “The Present Tense” and “The Daily Mail”, both already played live, left off.

Alexis Petridis gave no score in The Guardian. He compares the album's shape to David Bowie's Low, songs in one half and experiments in the other, except that here the difficult half comes first, and says it resists snap judgements far more than In Rainbows did.

The scores, 18 to 26 February 2011