You can download the new Thom Yorke solo album here for six bucks just like I did, but watcha gonna get?
After years of massively disliking Radiohead, I began to turn around with Kid A, and even more so with the first solo album by Thom Yorke, The Eraser. I even like Atoms For Peace, his band with Flea, so is it any surprise I am very very keen on Tomorrows’s Modern Boxes, a dystopic shudderring drone filled cacophony but musical cacophony which sounds like something going very very wrong on song after song after song.
Thom sings in his patented spooked out living wandering in the netherland voice, and producer Nigel Godrich fills the world with streams and shards of consciousness sounds. The album opens with radioheady dystopian “A brain In A Bottle” –being a little too literal but you can stream it for free when you check about Bit Torrant (here again, in case you weren’t paying attention).
The album improves immediately with the dragged and fagged out beauty “Guess Again!” and maintains a mood of extreme discomfort through gloom and doom bass piano notes on “Pink Section” which segues into “Nose grows Some”, yet another song suggesting less then happy thoughts for all.
The rhythm is all syncopated shards of sound sticking out and unlike AMOK, absolutely not built to dance to, it is built to prick your brain over and over again like a twinging nerve part, a world of hopelessness, boxed in if you will, not flowing but closeted. It is like a room with one door too many.
“Truth Ray” has Thom intoning, actually take the intoning as read, “No Mercy” like he could sound really lovely if he wanted to but it would be against his belief system.
Glum stuff , whether the huge spark of electronic dance blasts we’ve become used to or the bleak modulations of space creatures from afar, this works as one piece, maybe one long piece, of ambient despair for closed down merciless world; and when you follow the news every day it seems as apt a response as any available to us. If the dark ages were over so long ago, why dos it feel like they are back and why does it feel like this is the music England was listening to in 1066. “Pink Section” sounds like the wind that blew from Agincort to Flanders Field to Kirkuk and Al Quaim. It sounds like a horror moving through history. Still the songs are real songs, Yorke and Goodrich type of real but real. Sure, I prefer “Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses” and on first hear there is nothing to herald you in like that, nothing as alive in the depths of its depression. Yorke sounds like an angel who has just slit his wrist and is watching the blood rain away.
But it all seems to taking you somewhere else, all of it repays close listening… or will once I get the chance to give it a close listen
Grade: B+
