Thom Yorke - The Eraser

Debut albums always bring tricky situations with them; for new, aspiring artists the challenge is steep indeed, having to try and force oneself upon the general public and get noticed, find funding... all that jazz. For artists and musicians who are already very well known and are striving to reach out and make it on their own, the task at hand is an even greater challenge. Making your music sound as good as it has in the past but at the same time trying to create something new and different enough to set you apart from that past is a goal that is not easily tackled. Hell, just writing that down broke a sweat. Thom Yorke, the singularly brilliant lead vocalist and inspiration behind Radiohead has decided to tackle this mountain. And truth to tell, he could have done better.

Getting the obvious out of the way first there are extremely obvious Radiohead influences in there. Very good ones too. If you're asking my opinion (and you better be), Radiohead more recently have been going steadily down hill. We have an announcement of a seventh album and quite frankly, I'm not getting too excited. Back in the day, with Pablo Honey and The Bends, we could be satisfied with the tingling sensation the brilliantly written tracks gave us but which, unfortunately dies out as the albums progress after Kid A, which was half and half, as well as Amnesiac off of which I can claim to like 3 tracks only and Hail to the Thief which I downright cannot listen to. So to see that Yorke has gone back to his roots, drawing from his earlier work to stem the flow of rubbish and mould it into a sound that we all want to hear is a warming feeling. Unfortunately, this also rather lets him down; the album is just too much of a Radiohead album and doesn't strike away from the band enough to allow us see Yorke on his own. Still, there are a few jems to be sure, certain songs stand out above the usual 'modern' Radiohead and actually make you turn your head and listen.

Album title-track opener, The Eraser, starts the whole thing off on a hiccupping piano sample 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 ("Peel all your layers off/ I want to eat your artichoke heart" - please, you can do better than that!), 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, 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 producer-ly 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 (and here, again, is the comparative medium of band to solo artist), 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 swamp bucket I Might Be Wrong retread that barely even flaps its wings (never mind 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 jonseing, set up two stereos and play both solo records at once, Zaireeka-style. I wouldn't be surprised at all if that worked.

Through it all, the main thing that brings The Eraser down is Yorke's adherance to Radiohead's ideals and just doesn't push himself far enough away from the band he is so inclined to be associated with. Stick with the old stuff and you can't go wrong. Continue in this vein and end up the way of MetallicA; greatness falls easily. It just takes one album to far, St. Anger.

5/10

M_x <3>