He has a knack for decontextualizing mundane bits of cultural detritus-“Can we have the next contestant please,” he mumbles in “The Opposite”-and for both finding and subverting meaning in repetition. Lyrically, A Light for Attracting Attention is awash in the kinds of cryptic mantras of unease and alienation that tend to preoccupy Yorke’s writing.
The smile band full#
And on songs like “Pana-vision” and “Speech Bubbles,” this record has a swooning warmth, with strings performed by the London Contemporary Orchestra and a full brass section, as well. But while the drums on The King of Limbs sounded layered and manipulated, borne from loops and sequences, these drums are raw and heady. The percussive nature of this material, particularly the busy, rustling rhythms of “A Hairdryer” and “Thin Thing,” are likely to remind fans of a certain rhythm-heavy Radiohead album from 2011. Skinner’s unique playing delineates The Smile from their ancestral band and makes this album a vehicle of furious, eccentric grooves. He can play with restraint when required-on “Speech Bubbles,” he underlines one of Yorke’s wonderfully lush, desolate melodies with a pitter-patter shuffle-but he also steals the show on songs like “The Smoke,” whose funky, reverberated drum pattern sounds like a sample of a long-forgotten psych-rock gem from 1973. Skinner’s presence pushes the band towards syncopation and odd time signatures (am I crazy, or is “Skrting on the Surface” in 11/8?), and he has a way of playing against Greenwood’s riffs with spiky counterpoint. He’s a jazz player, not a rock drummer, and he dazzles with sinuous shuffles and intricate grooves.
They lack the wild-card element that most distinguishes The Smile from Radiohead: namely, Tom Skinner. (Resurrecting a live rarity from a decade prior-what could be more Radiohead than that?) If your heart lies with the abstract soundscapes of Kid A and Amnesiac, you may be drawn to downcast, synth-y cuts like “The Same” and “Waving a White Flag,” though these strike me as the album’s only weak tracks. If it’s the symphonic splendor of A Moon Shaped Pool you crave, you’ll be pleased with the minor-key twists and turns of “Pana-vision,” which shimmies and shakes in 7/8 time, or the gorgeous balladry of “Open the Floodgates,” which recalls “Daydreaming,” though it’s actually been floating around since 2009. I assume I Can’t Believe It’s Not Radiohead! was a rejected album title. No Radiohead side project has ever sounded quite as much like Radiohead as this band does, invoking many eras of the band’s career at once. Like much of this album, the emphasis is on proggy interplay over studio trickery.īut this is hardly a barebones garage-rock diversion. These songs are insular and anxiety-ridden, shorn of soaring choruses or straightforward rhythms, but they are also invigorating jolts of art-rock energy. “Thin Thing” is menacing and wonky, with a burbling guitar riff that seems maximized to confuse those YouTube guitar tutorial guys. “You Will Never Work in Television Again” has the high-octane guitars and mile-a-minute Yorke delivery to boost a dead person’s heart rate. Nearly half the time, A Light for Attracting Attention buzzes and crackles with a sense of reckless abandon absent from the last 15 years’ worth of Radiohead releases. But when The Smile finally emerged at the start of 2022 with their debut single, “You Will Never Work in Television Again,” a lurching anxiety attack of a song that could convincingly pass for an outtake from the My Iron Lung EP, an answer seemed to present itself: Was this new project an excuse for Yorke and Greenwood to shirk expectations, set aside their film scores, and turn up their amps like it’s 1994 and Yorke’s bleached-blonde hair still flops over his ears? The Smile, Greenwood later explained, “came about from just wanting to work on music with Thom in lockdown.” Why this required starting a new band instead of writing material for a new Radiohead LP has never been entirely clear. They called it The Smile-a reference to a Ted Hughes poem, not their sunny dispositions, in case there was any confusion-and they invited Tom Skinner, drummer for the British jazz group Sons of Kemet, to fill the intimidating position of the sole non-Radiohead member of the trio. During the first year of the pandemic, as Radiohead seemingly shifted from active band to archival project, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood did something they haven’t done since their teenage years: They formed a new band together.
0 kommentar(er)
