As a general rule of thumb, a musician needs to try different things, step out of his famous comfort zone, etc. undertakes a side project for this is not the case Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead partners with the famous jazz drummer Tom Skinner (Original member of Sons Of Kemet), they call themselves The Smile, but they might still be Radiohead. A restless new project, but one with a rather familiar uneasiness: free-flying sounds, fascinatingly muted guitars, highly syncopated rhythms, and dystopian synthesizers like the one mastering the first and immense ‘The Same’, a kind of alternative. Entry for ‘Kid A’.
After this ominous outburst, The Smile (misleading band name if any) continued to explore the darkness of modern life, the semi-hidden forces that control it, with lively cuts such as ‘Thin Thing’, the experimental German rock of the ’70s. Fantastic ‘Reverse’ with cubist guitar riff for legend. ‘We don’t know what tomorrow brings’ brought almost pop immediacy and ‘You’ll never work on TV again’, its thinly veiled attack on predators like Silvio Berlusconi, the almost garage-rock push we haven’t heard from Radiohead since the days of ‘The Folds’. Not everything had the same effect, and some songs went in very vague directions or were interchangeable, but when they got it right, The smile felt like a danger to the Radiohead members who weren’t involved in it..