Roots and Limbs

So I've been meaning to write a review of Radiohead's new album The King of Limbs for almost a week now, and now any thing original I could have said has been written.  I used to rush to buy new albums of my favorite bands after school on tuesdays when i was in high school, yet very few bands still ellicit the kind of excitement in me that these elf-helmed spinsters of aural webs do.  My first impression of the album was that I was missing a piece, the 8 songs being only a chunk of a larger whole.  Theories have already popped up that the rest of the album will be released in May (for those of us that bought the box set, this would explain the fact that we will be receiving 2 vinyl records), and that the last track Separator alludes to this in the last lines where Yorke repeats, "If you think this is over then you're wrong."  Or perhaps my boyish fantasies have allowed me to get swept up in hopes for more of Radiohead's material than any 1 person should digest at a time.  A friend said that the album is a sort of combination of Thom Yorke's solo material and Jonny Greenwood's sountrack to There Will Be Blood, betraying the reality that Limbs is not the immediately accessible album that In Rainbows had been for the uninitiated listener.  Drums, percussion, and beats cycle into and over one another, horns (that were tuned only slightly since Life in a Glass House) layer under and around Yorke's wafting vocals, and emotional landscapes that somehow bridge despair and climax remind the listener of a time both past and future where we required more from songwriters than formulaic progressions and bombastic choruses.  The depth of Limbs requires work on the part of the audience, and many will give up before they find the inherent pleasure in uncovering layer after layer of sonic emotions that defy easy description.  Perhaps that says something about our culture's need for immediate gratification and accessibility... or perhaps I'm pretentious.  But it's most likely some combination of the two.