Three things strike me. First, one can almost take it for granted that there is more material lying in wait; all previous Radiohead albums have been garnished with a decent batch of B-sides (not including Kid A, although Amnesiac followed soon after). Most recently, In Rainbows came with the bonus disc of 8 tracks; Amnesiac’s B-Sides form their own mini-album of greatness; OK Computer was followed by the Airbag: How’s My Driving EP that held 7 little gems; and the list goes on.
Second, the band have been extremely quiet since the release last week. In fact, they’ve been deathly silent. There’s been no media uprising of the usual sort in which one finds the papers drenched with interviews, and television and radio shows announcing bookings. This has never happened before. Of course, they could all be sitting at home, reclining by the fire with a cup of tea and their doting wives to keep them company, luxuriating in the knowledge that they’re the best band in the world, and generally letting the viral tornado build and build. This, however, doesn’t strike me as feasible – they were quick to quash rumors about a potential forthcoming EP, supposedly entitled "Wall Of Ice", in 2009 with the release of These Are My Twisted Words.
Third, even by the standards of the Radiohead fan-base, virile, active, and obsessive as it is, the tornado of speculation is turning into a veritable hurricane. If this silence continues any longer someone’s going to have to call George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. Never before have the online message boards received quite so much attention, and the fans aren’t there to argue the qualities of the album; they want more. Even the skeptics concede, if the storm has already hit these heights, there may just be something to this.
If you’re a spectator to all this, check in with this blog: The King Of Limbs Part 2, where all the evidence is nicely laid out in plain English. This fellow, “APORIA”, on the AtEase boards seems very interesting indeed, and well-read too. Octavia Paz and Ovid make up his reading list. He also quotes a line of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake about the inability of language to accurately reflect the whole of reality. Could it be a member of the band? Colin? Similarly, the fact that the album artwork seems to be encoded with birdsong is quite incredible, made more so by the fact that it sounds like “Sing A Song Of Sixpence” when played backwards. Personally, I’m not sure about this last one, but would Radiohead go to these lengths to bring a revolution to the revolution? You damn right they would.
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