Radiohead has a reputation for studio perfectionism and have been known to tinker with arrangements for years on tour, but they've rarely delivered an album as obsessive as The King of Limbs. Their most single-minded record, TKOL is an itchy and restless foray into making songs out of almost nothing except whizzing bits of rhythm. Even accounting for the brief dip into balladry toward the end, bands don't generally come up with something this uniformly dense and tense by tweaking over multiple sessions. But as longtime students of Can's Holger Czukay, Radiohead also know that fevered and compulsive-sounding records can be the product of painstaking editing, stitching multiple takes into one bristling rush.
Little of the band's careful detail work, or their general sense of passion, makes it onto TKOL RMX 1234567, a listenable but ultimately bloodless collection of remixes of songs from The King of Limbs. Whether intimidated by the thought of reinterpreting a band renowned for experimentation or unsure how to take apart and reassemble the band's tightly-wound recent material, too many of these 19 artists seem content to settle for bland beauty, or simply apply their usual sonic tricks without pushing themselves in the slightest.
The highlights are the tracks that take TKOL's joy in rhythm to new places. Acclaimed UK neo-rave producer Lone turns out a typically brilliant take on "Feral" that somehow keeps the original percussion pattern intact while recasting it as an early-1990s ambient house record, giving us TKOL RMX's most bizarrely enjoyable image: Radiohead gone to Ibiza. Pearson Sound, the alter-ego of dubstep progenitor and Hessle Audio label head Ramadanman, pulls a fantastic bait-and-switch, opening with an extended drone intro that shifts into a punchy mix of early Detroit techno and jagged jungle breaks. These two, along with a small handful of other acts-- Anstam squeezing drama from just a handful of skeletal drum patterns, SBTRKT recasting Thom Yorke as a forlorn garage diva, Caribou returning to his roots as a left-field beatmaker-- are fearless enough to recreate the feeling of TKOL in a new form. And a few do get by on sheer loveliness alone, like Four Tet spinning "Separator" into an old-school IDM lullaby.
But a far greater number of these remixes flatten out the complexity of TKOL's grooves in favor of commonplace arrangements. Instead of Radiohead's pinpoint editing, we get generically "wonky" takes on house and techno filled with stuttering drums and formless synth goo, whether aggressive like Blawan's take on "Bloom" or shoegaze-lite like Nathan Fake doing "Morning Mr Magpie". And some of the most touted names fail to deliver the craft we've come to expect from them: On his "Bloom" rework, Jamie xx ditches his minimalist gloom-funk for gauzy, forgettable ambience. More ethereal or abstract remixes of such anxious music could have been interesting, but few seem up to the task here, instead doling out placid and perfectly pleasant background noise.
For a while, until its complex grooves revealed the songs beneath, I dismissed TKOL as a brave but opaque attempt to remake Radiohead as just individual components in a roiling rhythm machine. In other words, it seemed like the perfect Radiohead album for remixing. Who would better understand that everything-is-rhythm impulse than dance music producers? If anything, wouldn't they take it further, make it wilder, go funkier?
The lack of rhythmic invention here could be forgiven if most of TKOL RMX displayed any kind of invention. Failing to match TKOL's peculiar vibe-- aggressive rhythms made out of dainty bits of digital detritus, robotically repetitive yet humanly off-kilter, parched thickets of drumming graced with fleeting moments of melodic relief -- is one thing. Failing to replace it with anything that similarly rewards listening deeper and harder is quite another.
