Little by Little

junkyard percussion

It came out of the same process as the rest of The King of Limbs: parts played, sampled, looped and cut up in Jonny Greenwood's software, the song built on what the loops suggested. Here the loops are mostly percussion, and the critics went looking for similes. Will Hermes in Rolling Stone heard junkyard gamelan and backward loops over a steady bass pulse, with a melody that had an Arabic cast to it. Jon Dolan, a month later in the same magazine, heard pencils being banged on bedsprings. Mark Pytlik at Pitchfork heard guitar shapes crumbling and percussion fizzing, and a song that sounded run-down on purpose; across that first half of the album he noticed Phil Selway's odd time signatures pushed to the front.

Hermes also thought a line of Yorke's about being a tease sounded oddly lonely, like someone singing into a phone camera turned on himself.

two stars, two picks

Opinions ran from warm to shrugging. Ryan Leas at Stereogum called it solid, and Chris DeVille, writing there ten years after release, thought the guitar part sounded like an unfinished demo. Robert Christgau gave the album a two-star honourable mention in his Consumer Guide and named two tracks worth the trip, this and “Bloom”. His one line on the record as a whole:

So much more fun than Eno these days.

robert christgau · consumer guide, 2011

first in the remix series

When the band handed the album to remixers, this was the first song out. Caribou's remix led the first TKOL RMX 12-inch on 4 July 2011, backed with Jacques Greene's “Lotus Flower”, and it reached number three on the UK physical singles chart. Shed's version followed on the fourth single on 15 August. Caribou, Dan Snaith, later supported Radiohead on the UK leg of the 2012 tour. The Guardian's review of TKOL RMX 1234567 wondered why anyone would ask Four Tet and Caribou to remix songs that already resembled their records.

twenty-six nights

It made its live debut at the surprise Glastonbury set on 24 June 2011, fourth in a set that NME printed that night, and was on the Live from the Basement film. Reviewing the first Roseland night in New York that September, Consequence heard real funk in it and in “Staircase”, with Yorke's Atoms for Peace still hanging over both.

It never settled in. The archive counts twenty-six nights: five in 2011 and twenty-one in 2012, the last at the Arena Parco Nord in Bologna on 25 September 2012. It has not been back.