A famous Roger Waters’ lyric goes - ‘hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way’. For Radiohead alums Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood, exploring this state of mind musically has paid the bills for thirty years. It is in the chaotic chunk chunk of Greenwood’s guitar on ‘Creep’ from debut album Pablo Honey. It is in Yorke’s pained, delicate falsetto on ‘Daydreaming’ from their latest (and last?) album A Moon Shaped Pool. A restless state of misery informs the musicality of Britain’s most important post-Beatles group. Their career trajectory is innovation as necessity. Guitars are pushed to the limits of sonic wizardry on The Bends and Ok Computer. Synths are co-opted to help the struggle of desperate re-invention on Kid A and Amnesiac.
I’m trying to dispassionately describe who I personally believe to be the greatest band of all time. I love Radiohead. Like millions around the world we are beyond irksome about our devotion. We debate In Rainbows vs Ok Computer until spouses tire and leave. We are King of Limbs apologists. We are Moon Shaped Pool finality deniers. We judge Blur vs Oasis arguments from a The Bends shaped cloud of superiority. We are not as much fun at parties as we think we are.
It is hard to separate Radiohead fans from the band itself, and perhaps harder again from the mythical figures of Yorke and Greenwood. I truly don’t think they care about their impact anywhere to the degree fans do. How could they? If they did they wouldn’t shapeshift every album cycle. Risks are never guaranteed to please.
This is to preface that, for all intents and purposes, A Light For Attracting Attention, the debut long play from The Smile, is a Radiohead album. This is not to discount the enormous contributions Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien and Phil Selway make (made?) to the discography. However, Yorke and Greenwood have long been assumed to be Radiohead’s creative nucleus.
There is too much shared creative memory between them to sound very far removed from their indelible musical history. I’m sure if Lennon and McCartney had collaborated in the
70’s it would have sounded a lot like The Beatles. There was certainly the familiarity of Zeppelin when Page and Plant reformed in 1994 sans John Paul Jones. I don’t expect the Jagger Richards Rolling Stones to change drastically in a post Charlie Watts world.
The surrounding cast of The Smile help keep this in familiar territory for fans of the Oxfordshire 5. Nigel Godrich has long been considered the unofficial sixth member of Radiohead. His producer and band partnership is often compared to the vaunted George Martin and Beatles pairing, in longevity and impact. His perseverance with drawing out high-fidelity experiences from the analogy technology of yesteryear has been an inextricable piece of Radiohead’s sonic jigsaw since Ok Computer. It is utilised to its fullest extent on A Light For Attracting Attention.
Tom Skinner as well, on drums and modular synths, is playing in a well worn sandpit. He isn’t asked to meet Yorke and Greenwood very far from where Phil Selway would normally reside on a Radiohead album. Certainly the drum intro’s from some tracks sound straight out of the Radiohead ‘Real Book’. ‘The Opposite’ sounds like an ‘Reckoner’ tribute and debut single ‘You Will Never Work in Television Again’ has its ‘Bodysnatchers’ similarities emphasised heavily by a referential backbeat to name a couple.
None of this is a bad thing. For those Radiohead fans who recognise A Moon Shaped Pool as a probable goodbye, an accessible album with more than a little of its predecessor’s DNA in its bones is a welcome sound.
At its core A Light for Attracting Attention is more guitar-forward than any Radiohead album since In Rainbows, its nearest sonic comparison. Although looping electronic arpeggios and droning synth string parts are not strangers throughout the LP - bass, electric guitar and piano form the musical backbone.
Within the limitations of a trio is a freedom of instrument selection. Yorke is clearly enjoying playing bass guitar on ‘The Smoke’. The track’s eery revolving groove is a major key ear worm that clashes with a more typical floating minor counter melody. Greenwood is gorgeous on his dual rhythm lead delay guitar part of ‘Thin Thing’, a job that was harder for
him to explore when he is one of three guitars on a ‘Paranoid Android’ or a ‘House of Cards’. His piano playing is also given more room to shine on A Light, now not just the realm of Yorke.
Godrich’s devotion to recording analog sound sources to tape fill is a tactile listening experience. Tape operates differentially to the more popular digital options that dominate the recording landscape. Things must be committed to. Changes are limited after the fact. Off-beat, off-kilter, out of time appregios and guitar delays are printed. They pulse and collapse against each other. Close listening is like trying to time the waves on a beach. They feel like they arrive at equal points in time, but they don’t. There’s a humanity in it, especially on wilting highlight ‘Open the Floodgates’. One of Yorke’s best chord progressions since ‘Everything in its Right Place’, the waves of swinging loops and echoes layer against it like a weighted blanket.
Lyrically Yorke is still mining territory he excavated on A Moon Shaped Pool. Dreary album opener ‘The Same’ has a more direct message that seems like verse off cuts from ‘Burn the Witch’. Reasons for hope that Yorke lays out on ninth track ‘Free in the Knowledge’ (“Free in the knowledge that one day this will end, Free in the knowledge that everything is change”) is dashed by album closer ‘Skrting on the Surface’ (“Dull eyes, trying to pull you through the ice…Being drawn to the ledge…When we realize that we are broken, nothing mends…”). Life and the world is pretty crappy at the moment - evidently even for British millionaires who voted STAY.
There’s a prescription within the album however. Like the music, themes and sound of this album - there is joy in the familiarity of it. We can hang on… in quiet desperation…
