This is Yorke's first solo album. "The Eraser" features nine new tracks and was produced by Nigel Godrich. Thom is currently on tour with Radiohead, who are showcasing brand new material alongside old favorites. Radiohead continue to tour through the summer, playing the US in June and festivals across Europe in August.
Review by Andy Kellman
The Eraser, Thom Yorke's first album away from Radiohead, is intensely focused and steady. It doesn't have the dynamics -- the shifts of mood, tempo, volume -- held by any Radiohead album, and it's predominantly electronic, so it's bound to rankle many of the fans who thought Kid A was too unhinged from rock & roll. It's definitely not the kind of album you put on to get an instant shot of energy, and at the same time, it doesn't contain anything as sullen as "How to Disappear Completely." Since it is so balanced, it might initially seem unwavering, but the details that differentiate the songs become increasingly apparent with each successive listen. Despite a reliance on machine beats and synthetic textures, Yorke's untouched, upfront vocals and relatively straightforward lyrics should be enough to bring back some of the detractors; he would have no trouble taking these songs on the road with a piano and an acoustic guitar. "Black Swan," the standout, comes across as a less guitar-heavy and more subdued version of Amnesiac's "I Might Be Wrong." Peek beneath the surface and you'll see that there's a lot more seething involved: "You have tried your best to please everyone/But it just isn't happening/No, it just isn't happening/And it's f*cked up, f*cked up." The opener, the title track, asks the album's first set of probing questions, including "Are you only being nice because you want something?" Along with the thoroughly sweet "Atoms for Peace," it vies for the album's prettiest-sounding five minutes, elevating into a chorus of hovering sighs as Yorke projects lightly with a matter-of-fact tone, "The more I try to erase you, the more, the more, the more that you appear." On the explicitly political end is "Harrowdown Hill," anchored by a snapping bass riff and percussive accents that skitter and slide back and forth between the left and right channels. Yorke defeatedly states, "You will be dispensed with when you become inconvenient," and asks "Did I fall or was I pushed?" referring to Dr. David Kelly, a whistle-blowing U.N. weapons inspector whose death -- which took place following a sequence of events that led to a testimonial before a parliamentary committee -- was ruled a suicide. It's no shock that the album entails some heavy subject matter and sounds as close to a version of Radiohead minus four of its members as one can imagine. What distinguishes The Eraser from the Radiohead albums, beyond the aspects mentioned above, is its ability to function in the background or as light listening without the requirement of deep concentration. The constant stream of soft, intricately layered sounds, while not without a great deal of tension in most spots, can be very comforting. Yorke's assertion that the album isn't truly a solo release is accurate. Producer Nigel Godrich, whose relationship with Radiohead exceeds a decade, played a major role, contributing arrangements, "extra instruments," and enough influence to guide the album into its tight song-oriented structure. Without him, the well-executed album would've likely sounded a lot closer to the kind of stray-idea patchwork experiment that so many other long-boiling side projects resemble. And, to a somewhat lesser extent, Yorke needed his bandmates as well; some of the sounds were pulled and manipulated from a bank of the band's unused recordings.
Thom Yorke
The Eraser
[XL; 2006]
Rating: 6.6
No band of the last 15 years has seen its individual players revered to the same extent as Radiohead's. Whether or not you subscribe to the church of the blinking bear, it's hard to argue against the incredible good fortune that's seen them blossom from the nebbish and resoundingly ordinary young group On a Friday. While Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood will always stand at stage center, you barely need 10 minutes with a Radiohead record to understand how readily the band shifts its weight from one member to another; so strong are their individual voices as musicians that you can practically hear the pistons moving underneath their songs.
But we're coming up on seven albums now, each one of them (if you believe the soundbites) an utterly excruciating process. That, combined with Yorke's headstrong affinity for laptop music and his MP3 era-friendly motto of expediency, has pried the door open for a solo quickie. So, on the heels of the news that Radiohead's vaunted seventh full-length wouldn't be ready any time soon, Yorke carpet-bombed fans in May by announcing The Eraser.
That was a little over seven weeks ago, and you can be sure the window between name and release was purposely kept small so as to mitigate against the weight of expectation. We know this because, for all their No Logo sloganeering, Radiohead have never been afraid to deploy a marketing juggernaut to herald their imminent return. If the message being transmitted here is a modest one, it's because The Eraser is a modest record. Contrary to some of the band's prior releases (and, perhaps, their legacy), it's not an attempt to remake the wheel, but rather, pretty much exactly the kind of thing you'd expect Yorke to make in his bedroom-- glitchy, sour, feminine, brooding, imperfect. It's also strikingly beautiful and thuddingly boring in maddeningly equal measure.
Let's start with the good stuff: Opener "The Eraser" rests on a hiccuping piano sample, a bubblebath of bloops and some gently insistent vocal acrobatics. "The more you try to erase me/ The more that I appear," sings Yorke, in the first of the album's many lines that could just as easily be about environmental crises as personal. Next up is the skittering "Analyse", which marries a twinkling piano lead to a breakbeat made of crushed glass. Lyrically, Yorke is in solid form, singing about algebra, candles in the city, and "no light in the dark." He's not nearly as sharp on the sleepy-eyed "Atoms for Peace" (how's this for a clanger: "Peel all your layers off/ I want to eat your artichoke heart"), but it provides some of the album's most serene moments, wherein he sets his falsetto against a wall of discordant keyboard drones to gorgeously vertiginous effect. Better still is the closer "Cymbal Rush", which comes off as "The Gloaming"'s moonstruck cousin. A wash of digital burbles and woozy drones, the song's second half relents to a set of galloping piano chords and complex rhythm tracks, making it, from a producerly standpoint, the most accomplished thing here.
Where The Eraser sags is in the middle, with tracks 3-5 falling particularly flat. Like too many of Radiohead's new songs, they contain a single weak idea dragged on interminably. "The Clock" is a tuneless clatter of insect noises and acoustic guitars that never changes course; "Black Swan" is a swampbucket "I Might Be Wrong" retread that barely even flaps its wings (nevermind gets off the ground); and the horrorshow talkie "Skip Divided", with its cursory arrangements and total absence of melody, feels like second-rate performance poetry.
On a smaller scale, the problems afflicting these tracks afflict the album as a whole; even allowing for the better-crafted songs, there's little-to-no dynamic range on The Eraser. As a listening experience, it's claustrophobic and compressed, and with rare exception, offers little in the way of wide open space. What little breathing room there is usually comes courtesy of Yorke's vocal, and while it's nice to see him once again testing the limits of what he can do naturally with his voice, it might not be enough to save the record for some.
The word 'gray' will be used to describe The Eraser, and with good reason-- unless you're predisposed to loving everything Yorke sets his voice against, you mind fight this an oppressively dreary affair. My totally catty suggestion: Don't bother with this unless you've already worn out the grooves on Jonny Greenwood's much less-heralded but completely brilliant Bodysong soundtrack. Or maybe, if you're really jonesing, set up two stereos and play both solo records at once, Zaireeka-style. I wouldn't be surprised at all if that worked.
-Mark Pytlik, July 10, 2006
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