As Oasis announce that they will be including America in their reunion tour, to finally ‘take’ the country that famously resisted their charms back in the day, what of Radiohead? A band who, while Oasis fell into coke-bloated decline after Knebworth, easily ‘took America’ the first time around in 1997 following the release of Ok Computer, and fulfilled Oasis’ fading dreams of being the biggest band in the world.
Just as Oasis with all their rage and defiance and hope, captured something important in the national mood of the UK at least, so Radiohead captured the disquiet around Blair’s messiah-liar PM performances, the pre-millennial paranoia, the anxiety around consumerism-as-fulfilment, and dawning digital alienation (all things which we readily accept as just daily life These Days, proving rock n roll can’t save the world after all).
Apparently Radiohead have also been rehearsing again, 8 years since their last album, A Moon Shaped Pool, but no-one but fans are particularly excited for Reasons, which include there being no sense of unfinished business – Radiohead did it all as a band, experiments and anthems, at the very top of the tree (until they planted a stultifying, self-important one over their own heads, called The King of Limbs (come on Radiohead fans, ...Limbs was dead wood, all bark no bite, mulch ado about nothing – and no I won’t leaf it alone).
But mostly their absence hasn’t particularly been felt, because frontman Thom Yorke has been such a busy bee. He comes from the Damon Albarn school of doing everything, everywhere. all at once, though he seems way less concerned with staying chart relevant and more interested in what happens when you combine prog-electronica with hauntology.
There’s no great dramatic fallouts or resurrections with Radiohead, or indeed cash-ins and cash-outs, and arguably the band have become just one path of many Yorke can take as he follows his restless musical spirit.
And so to The Smile, his band with Radiohead’s musical genius/thinking person’s guitar sex god Jonny Greenwood, and Sons of Kemet’s jazz drummer extraordinaire Tom Skinner. Due to the presence of Greenwood the band has often been seen as half-a-Radiohead, and it is tempting to believe that this, and Yorke’s solo work and soundtrack work, is essentially field research for the main band, for when they can bear to be back in a room together. Doubtful Yorke sees any of it that way, and in fact The Smile’s new album Cutouts is their most fully-realised so far; musically and conceptually.
What is The Smile? Well, it’s the big pained one reflected back momentarily from screens.
This is actually The Smile’s second album this year, following January’s Wall of Eyes. Originating from the same sessions, it has a similar sense of expansiveness and freedom racing around its needling dread. The presence of the London Contemporary Orchestra has been a masterstroke on these records, who add both an epic quality of the most unsettling kind, as on Instant Psalm here, where the string arrangements intersect oddly while woodwinds drive on the jazz away from wanky jazz into more Bowie Blackstar jazz.
Actually, there’s something of Bowie’s Low about this album, a lonely, traumatised plane of existence that is filled with new possibilities. There’s Vangelis too, sci-fi dreams and nightmares. Krautrock also, or cosmic rock as you’re supposed to call it now, motoric rhythms fuelled on anxiety driving towards euphoria, only to crash into a lampost.
Zero Sum, one of the lead-off singles, is very Can, with Yorke giving it some beat poetry – “vacant lots” and all – over limb-breaking Skinner propulsion as Greenwood burbles out guitar sounds that may not be guitar sounds at all (all the way through, you’re like, ‘what’s this guy playing here? Crickets and toads?’). “So overconfident,” Yorke yelps, “Thinking all the ways the system will provide… Windows 95”. Alrighty then. You get the idea though: this is a world so sure of its own rightness yet plunging into hell.
It’s a running theme. “You can change your mind, let the colours fly, and start lashing out,” he sings on Colours Fly, a growing thunderous exhortation to free expression, or a warning? As with much of the record it feels very apposite to now, agitated and exhilarating and dangerous. This is an evil smile, a fixed grin.
Don’t Get Me Started is a Dario Argento soundtrack to a social media shooing, saying “I’m not the villain, choose someone else,” before concluding “Your voice means nothing.”
The mordant Tiptoe also looks at the silent, hostile and anonymous forces online, gathering to witness and fuel the Twitter cess pit, or as Yorke puts it, “all you appeasers and enablers, eating scraps from the swill, as quietly as insects, a toxic repetition.” It all climaxes with closing track, Bodies Laughing, in which he decries, “they laugh and then they hoot…we can’t control it anymore.”
There’s a sense of a world turned cruel, derisive, violent and that everything is out of our hands. In dealing with this, The Smile gets under our skin right now, in a way that Radiohead couldn’t. In the rush of their work, both within songs and with all these releases, they are reflecting the anxiety-fueled present moment where attention is fleeting and joy and despair flit in and out of our psyches a few times a second.
This is not music done by committee, it operates closer to the nervous system than that. And if it loses the romanticism of the Big Band Making A Big Statement, it’s because the very idea feels absurd. Big Bands just do Big Shows now, they give a nice time and are not expected to, yknow, say something. The action on this front, is strictly around the margins, and credit to Yorke, Greenwood and Skinner for scratching out a place there to tell us what we all don’t want to hear in highly listenable form. This Smile is an unnerving one.
