Radiohead's King of Limbs remix album, TKOL RMX 1234567, is out

TKOL RMX 1234567, Radiohead's double CD of remixes from The King of Limbs, is out in the UK today on XL Recordings. Japan had it first, on 16 September, and the US release follows tomorrow on tbd records, the band's label. Uncut streamed the whole album last Tuesday.

It gathers the 19 remixes the band issued over the summer on seven limited 12-inch singles, about one a fortnight from July to late September. Fact reckons that collecting all seven cost close to £50, for records in plain brown card with no inner sleeve or insert, and puts the double CD at about a fifth of that.

The two discs run in the order the singles came out, eight tracks on the first and 11 on the second. They go from Caribou's “Little By Little”, which opened the series in July, to SBTRKT's “Lotus Flower” from the last single.

All eight songs on The King of Limbs are remixed at least once. “Bloom” gets the most, five goes, from Harmonic 313, Mark Pritchard, Blawan, Objekt and Jamie xx, whose “Bloom Rework” was the last record of his Radio 1 Essential Mix on 26 August.

Fact finds good pieces in the set, Thriller's “Give Up The Ghost” and Anstam's “Separator” for two, but says they never add up to more than a collection of tracks. Rory Gibb, in The Quietus, credits the band with handing underground producers this audience but wishes more of them had cut Yorke's voice out. Slant argues that the remixers catch the mood The King of Limbs was after better than the album itself did, and rates Jamie xx's the best of the “Bloom” versions.

Thom Yorke says in the album's press material that he was not after dancefloor fillers. I was really curious to see how the people I was listening to so much would use what we gave them.¹² The band like the idea that a song need not be fixed in one version, and it feels kind of healthy for music¹².

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