There are some times in your life when you can do nothing except be thankful just to be alive: the birth of your first child, that first big job that will lead to all your dreams, your first Major League championship, those awesome trips to the dentist when you’ve got no cavities. Of course, only one of those is the ideal life scenario, the accomplishment to beat all accomplishments, flawless and beautiful. Think about it: the authorities will eventually discover your massive steroid usage; you probably won’t ever move up that corporate ladder because you learned all too quickly how evil the world is and want to keep yourself pure; that child might not be yours – you did always suspected that your babymama may really be a hoochiemama. I suppose I may be biased, though, as my dentist is also my best friend, and there is nary an appointment that doesn’t rank among my “Top 5 Life Experiences”. I walked in today not to be assaulted by the top 40/oldies bullshit that plagues most waiting room speakers, but found myself instead fascinated by Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke’s first solo outing, The Eraser. Luckily, I walked in just as the album was being put on, the first dramatic piano chords of the title track quickly filling my ears. I can’t help but think that it’s a bit more electronic than I expected it would be. For whatever reason, news of a Thom Yorke solo album brought to mind more thoughts of OK Computer’s “Exit Music” rather than Kid A’s “Morning Bell” – more acoustic big-hook balladry than continued rambling experiments in electronica. “Analyse” kicks in, all Amnesiac-esque fake plastic drumbeats and shakers, twinkling pianos and Yorke’s unmistakable humming and buzzing. The good doctor beckons me to come down the hall to the exam room. “This is just Thom Yorke right, not some lost Radiohead b-sides?” I ask. “Yeah, how do you like it? Have you heard it?” he asks in reply. “It’s alright. The first song was a great waiting room song, very soothing, comforting. Is the whole record like this though?” I sit down in the chair. It’s cold, like always, only this time it seems fittingly so. He asks what I mean. “I don’t know…sleepy, robotic, kind of inhuman. I’m surprised that it’s so similar to Kid A/Amnesiac-era Radiohead … but at the same time I’m completely unsurprised by that.” “Surprisingly unsurprising?” “Exactly.” “The Clock” is playing over the speaker. Its sparse beat is made up of myriad little bass-and-snare tics, claves, and a little beatboxing by the man himself. “Time is running out for us,” he tells me. About to force a metal instrument into my mouth and cut up my gums, the dentist brings down the tension a bit and asks if I saw Thom Yorke on the Independent Film Channel’s Henry Rollins Show. I told him no, and since when the fuck did Henry Rollins get a show and why don’t I watch it every single night? “I don’t know, since he did. But yeah, he played this one – ‘The Clock’ – and the album closer, ‘Cymbal Rush’. It’s amazing the way he brings life to these obviously fake, lifeless songs. And not just on this album, Radiohead stuff, too. He does this song acoustic by himself and the other one with Jonny Greenwood and Nigel Godrich. This one fares better, but for both of them I really was surprised how great it sounds without all the electronic stuff around it.” I could have told him that without hearing it. Radiohead songs have always had an amazing sense of musicality about them that makes them instantly effective when stripped down: the extra shit’s gone, all it’s got to show is the song that was under it all to begin with. The first single, “Black Swan,” ends, and so far I’m disappointed with The Eraser. Not because it’s a bad record so far – Yorke’s individual song-crafting skills are incredibly strong – and not because every time the good doctor tells me to spit I see blood and small chunks of gum tissue amongst the thick green special-dentist-toothpaste residue. Maybe I just had too much resting on my expectations, but I didn’t expect Thom Yorke to rest so heavily on his own laurels. There’s not a lack of experimentation, per se, but it’s all just an extension of experimentation that we know Yorke has already done. For most of “Black Swan,” I keep expecting him to mumble “I’m a reasonable man, get off my case,” the hook of Amnesiac’s “Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box”. “He’s done this before, it doesn’t sound all that groundbreaking … but the songs are good, so I can’t even truly not like it,” I manage to get out despite a mouthful of dental appliances. “I got that feeling, too. But he’s still a great lyricist, no matter how obscure he gets sometimes. He’s one of the only singers whose lyrics don’t even have to even be coherent to be beautiful and meaningful.” He asks if I caught a line from “Black Swan” – “You cannot kickstart a dead horse, you just crush yourself and walk away/I don’t care what the future holds, I’m right here and I’m today.” I told him I hadn’t, but he didn’t need to show any new evidence of Yorke’s writing finesse, I’ve known that since I first saw the shaky animation of the “Paranoid Android” video years ago, before I even knew what Radiohead was. “And the refrain of this song is ‘This is fucked up / fucked up.’ He gets you so immersed in the sounds that even harsh words come off as just another gorgeous addition.” “Skip Divided,” a throwaway track peculiarly placed right smack in the center of the record, seems to exist only to trick everyone into believing that it could be the greatest electronica-soul song ever. It does, however, lead quite nicely into “Atoms For Peace”, a very second-half-of-Kid A slow-build type of song with an electronic drumbeat and Yorke showing off vague lyrics wrapped around some of his finest vocal acrobatics. Kind of like three or four of the other songs here. “This is a really great song, really subdued, I love the lyrics, definitely one of the best so far, and you almost feel as if Yorke’s words are climbing as his voice ascends in range. But I still can’t get past the sense that he just didn’t try hard enough… I just feel like I’ve heard this before.” The film is painstakingly being scraped off my teeth as I explain this. And the fact that the very next song sounds incredibly similar certainly doesn’t bolster my sentiments on Yorke, or the sting of metal scraping off my enamel. A new song now. “Is that –” “– a little funky bass work?” He finishes my thought. “Yeah. This is ‘Harrowdown Hill’. This one and the closer are the two most ghostly songs; the keys just sustain and build, very haunting. The bass and rhythms really click, so it reaches this near-epic level by the end.” He chuckles to himself. “This song is about an Iraq weapons inspector who allegedly committed suicide, but it sounds like this beautiful love song. And like I said before, ‘Cymbal Rush’ works better live, when it’s a little more stripped down and way more human, but I love the way it starts real small and turns into this huge, layered song and then just drops out, just stops.” “That’s kind of surprising, one of the more sudden things about it. I would’ve expected a more subtle ending.” “Definitely.” He hands me the CD and the bill. I shoot a glare his way. Smug bastard. I wave to the good doctor on my way out. “It may be the most surprisingly unsurprising album I’ve heard all year, but that doesn’t mean I can’t love it.” -phil |
