For example, instead of traveling the world filling stadiums with their OK Computer 25th anniversary tour, Radiohead seeks fulfillment by exploring the musical arts. Maybe it sounds a bit pretentious when put like that, but that’s just the way we are: It seems that the decisions that need to be justified are those motivated by creative impulses, not commercial ones.
Radiohead went on hiatus after A Moon Shape Pool (2016), and two of their fifth members (Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood) took advantage of the pandemic break to release The Smile, a second-tier-looking work. But once normality is restored, this person, rather than Radiohead, continues to move forward. Now. The new vehicle tells us that the pair found a path of excitement and freedom to step away from the chaos in their alliance with the third leg of the combo, drummer Tom Skinner (of the avant-garde jazz band Sons of Kemet). a brand established like that of the parent group.
From the laboratory to the real world
Wall of Eyes makes for an adventurous but not scary listen: it has its daring and discomforts but ultimately reveals a welcoming melodic heart. Compared to the debut album, A Light to Call Attention (2022), it sounds less like a laboratory and more like a lived-in piece and bearer of humanity, albeit in an extreme or suspicious way. It’s a slightly more organic album than that, starting with a sort of lo fi bossa nova on the title track, where Yorke tells us about that wall of eyes to express the idea of loneliness in the crowd.
The album wanders through various sonic registers with abstract, dissonant guitar riffs breaking into Read the Room and Under Our Pillows; In this song, math rock with traces of King Crimson bends halfway through, floating with King Crimson’s take on robotics. krautrock among electronic soundscapes. But what characterizes the album is less the search for angular planes than emotion, something very perceptible in a friend of a friend, a piece in which Yorke sings plaintively over a simple piano base to which percussions and strings have been added. (by the London Contemporary Orchestra) presents human relationships and the masks we use as a lyrical backdrop.
The climax is Bending Hectic, climbing Everest (or the Italian Alps, where we see Yorke gliding down mountain roads at full speed and about to lose sight of the world), a majestic crescendo over eight minutes reminiscent of a day in the life. The Beatles. The song Cathedral is symbolic of an album in which The Smile team finds excitement and pleasure, feeling liberated from what they believe the world expects from them.