Radiohead cures Bieber Fever

Radiohead albums are the trust-busters of popular music, and their new album King of Limbs is no exception. (Yes, I am comparing Thom Yorke to Teddy Roosevelt.) Radiohead albums shoot out into the universe with one purpose: distract the drooling mainstream media with artistry and the ability to be cooler than anyone without saying anything.

They did it with “In Rainbows” (2007) by releasing the album online and letting fans pay what they wanted for it. On Friday, they did it again. Radiohead released their eighth studio album, and while this one cost $9 for the mp3 download (hey, dude’s gotta eat), the band succeeded to distract by dropping the album a day earlier than they announced less than a week before, on Valentine’s Day — and the critics clamored. Rolling Stone had more stories about the eight-track album than they did about their new cover boy Justin Bieber.

Thom Yorke successfully distracted the world’s most famous music publication from Beiber Fever. Now do you get the the Teddy reference? He and his gang of British rock ‘n’ roll misfits broke the monotonous monopoly of the Biebers, the Gagas, the Katys, the Britneys. And thank the rock gods they did.

“King of Limbs” is Radiohead’s best album since “OK Computer.” It’s short, and it doesn’t try to be overly ambitious like “Kid A” (2000), which is (arguably) about terrorist conspiracy theories and Orwellian communist threats, or too political like 2003’s “Hail to the Thief.” Instead, this album is a completely different beast — it’s not conceptual, it’s, dare I say, pretty…and grotesque. Which is probably why it’s named after an ancient tree in the Savernake Forest in Witlshire, England.

The lyrics are beautiful, but the beats are coarse, often slipping into the UK-made dubstep dance rhythms like in “Feral” and the punkadelic “Morning Mr. Magpie,” in which Yorke whines “You’ve got some nerve/coming here/you stole it all/give it back.” It’s like an anthem for Narnia when the cranky kid gets kidnapped by the witch lady.

“Codex” is an orchestral piano ballad about rebirth in a very natural sense. “Jump off the end/into a clear lake/no one around,” Yorke sings in his distinctive falsetto. It makes you want to jump in with him…where ever he’s going.

All the metaphors, and even the song titles, relate back to some kind of mythical forest, reminiscent of the ancient tree. The album’s opening track, “Bloom,” is oddly reminiscent of “The Nutcracker“’s “Waltz of the Flowers,” if the ballet dancers were all at an Ecstasy-induced rave, and is about the natural things that keep a person alive. “Lotus Flower” is presumably about something so seductive and so beautiful that Yorke can’t help but “slip into the groove” and beg, “cut me up and cut me up.”

But all this analysis could be for naught because at the end, Yorke tells us that once again, the joke could be on us. Yorke hints that he could have once again hidden something so deep within this album that we, the laypeople, could never possibly understand or that “King of Limbs” is just a 37-minute teaser to another, longer piece of work (something better than “The Bends”?). In the album’s disco-ish closer, “Spectator,” Yorke ominously sings, “If you think this is everything, you’re wrong.”

I guess we keep waiting for Yorke and Co.’s next big move. Well played, Radiohead. Well played.