Thom Yorke

I was eager to listen to the Eraser, in part because it's being released on XL among labelmates Devendra Banhart, Peaches, Dizzee Rascal and Tapes 'n Tapes, but also because I have been more interested in Radiohead since Hail to the Thief. What seemed occasionally indulgent and overwrought on previous efforts began to come into focus. The nice thing about Yorke's self-obsession is it demands constant over-appraisal, and ellicits constant change. Likewise I expected this album (a Thom Yorke solo? He would say otherwise) to be a few steps ahead of HTTT, and hey, it is. It returns to the over-processed music Yorke is fond of paired with Yorke's Goreyesque humor and love of sociological implication. On Eraser, as on HTTT and hopefully the forthcoming Radiohead works, the experimentation of Kid A and Amnesiac is streamlined, and rather than focus his melody on the dissonance created by the ProTools method Yorke seems to have discovered on OK Computer, he uses it to complement the songs he has. For all the talk of Radiohead's music being intentionally obscurant, they have always been writers of pop music, and this album is strong piece of pop music. Thom's comfortableness with the processing of sounds seems well anchored here, despite the speed bump of Skip Divided. So far the tracks standing out to me are Eraser, Black Swan, Harrowdown Hill and Cymbal Rush. They all have the strong floating focus that Yorke achieves at his best. Black Swan even sounds like a Beck song for a second. Two artists came to mind listening to this record; Jan Jelinek who seems to be increasingly either influencing or influenced on/by Radiohead, I can't tell. Probably both. His latest creaky release "Kosmischer Pitch" is a brilliant piece of processed music that rivals the work of Julian Fane, a Canadian fellow who writes more pop-oriented electronic which still indulges in Fennesz-influenced texturing. If you can listen to Fane's Book Repository you should, it's a great song.

The art on the Eraser was done by Stanley Donwood, who has done most of the Radiohead album art for the last decade or so. Stan's art work is always a spectacle. Hail to the Thief, taking heavy visual cues from painters Peter Davies and Jules de Balincourt, displayed a post-9-11 concern about national identity and the hollowness of rhetoric. The black and white imagery on Eraser, on the other hand, seems like a cross between Edward Gorey and Japanese scroll paintings, signalling a turn from the bemused engagement with language to a more inspired, eschatological scenery, featuring the tall buildings of London awash like a sea. A prescient imagining of post-global warming Europe? The image seems imbued with, as Yorke describes on Analyze, "A self fulfilling prophesy of endless possibility...there's no spark, no light in the dark..." Could the flood be simply an attempt to understand the ravages of time by imagining them as unified image? It's possible, it's possible.
The Guardian's review of Eraser is a great example of the cliche that rock critics have created for Yorke and Radiohead generally; that they snubbed their audience following OK Computer. While they may have created indulgent albums following OK Computer, they never strayed far from pop, or ceased touring, recording or interviewing for long. Thom Yorke's attitude toward major music-review organs reminds me of what Thomas Pyhcon said about being a recluse, which is that "recluse" when mentioned by journalists, means "doesn't like to talk to journalists." On that note, is there a rule among professional reviewers that when talking about Thom Yorke or his work, the adjectives "dreary," "cranky," "grumbling," or "mumbling" have to be used several times each? They may be occasionally apt, but they have become banal stuffing for reviews that have nothing to say. Radiohead remains one of Britain's great bands and I don't think the music press always knows what to make of it. Pitchfork is no exception; besides lamenting the lack of "open space" they make the useless sugggestion of playing this record and Johnny Greenwood's Bodysong as the same time. Had Radiohead done what was expected of them after OK Computer, they probably would be about as relevant as Oasis right now, but instead they have kept fans on the edge of their seats despite being described at every turn as conceptual, grumbling, cranky, etc, in short everything that belies the traditional idea of rock bands as dumb sexy beasts. Perhaps Yorke was alluding to the pencil of someone writing a review of this album; "the more you erase me / the more I appear...."

The album succeeds exactly where some would have it fail; in its optimism. Yorke may sing about hungry worms seeing "what's up" and chant "it's fucked up" and "it's unstoppable," but somehow this is more optimistic to me than hearing Ted Nugent sings about San Francisco girls, or Sufjan Stevens about the midwest for that matter. Yorke is dealing with the worms and phantoms of dread that everyone else is, but rather than shunt them, he makes his demons dance. And that is good fun. Isn't doom a bit easier to cope with in a song?