Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard first crossed paths in 2012, after Radiohead, on a night off tour in Sydney, turned up to the dextrous producer’s festival set. The two of them chatted over dinner in a meeting that Pritchard, perhaps surprisingly, portrays as a perfectly casual affair. On the right is an inscrutable titan of art-rock, presumably shooting daggers around the room while cryptically eating a salad. On the left is the bespectacled interloper with more production aliases than anyone can count, propounding a hare-brained scheme to get together and rustle up some tunes.
But travelers of the dance underground represented mythic figures to Yorke. By 2012, he was already several years into a self-imposed life sentence of atonement for his part in some of the greatest rock music ever made. Cult concerns like Link and Reload—Pritchard’s sprawling constellation in the extended Warp universe—had long ago bewitched the singer, a man who still seems personally affronted that Radiohead are more popular than LFO. So “yeah, yeah,” Yorke told him. “Just send me whatever you want.”
Nearly a decade later they started work on Tall Tales. By then, Pritchard had released the scenic 2016 album Under the Sun—featuring his first collaboration with Yorke—and evolved from a fiendish dance stylist into a mellow elder statesman. During pandemic lockdowns, Yorke took a trove of Pritchard instrumentals and gave them hell, shuffling synths and disembowelling basslines before sending it all back for review. Maybe it was lockdown fever, but Yorke saw an opportunity to take some strange vocal turns—the croaks, chirrups, siren songs, and sneering monologues of a voice forever lashing out at its inconvenient beauty. A chance, in short, for two serious musicians to limber up and have fun.
And that is exactly what transpires on roughly half of Tall Tales. “The White Cliffs” takes a cosmic trip to the dark side of Air’s Moon Safari; “The Men Who Dance in Stag’s Heads” is Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” dreaming of a medieval folk ballad, Yorke’s narrator a mystic Lou Reed. “The Spirit” is a bolt of silvery joy, keyboard pulse and vocal line in rapturous harmony, life-loving lyrics spiked with only a hint of irony: “I wish you well/Pray for peace/A magic spell that sends you all to sleep.”
“The Spirit” steals the show on track six, and the album could probably have started there. Yorke and Pritchard tinkered away on Tall Tales for some three years, which is not readily apparent in the sequencing or editing. Eight-minute opener “A Fake in a Faker’s World” is alluring but impenetrable, a union of outros asserting its right to form a song. When the ambient paean of “Ice Shelf” follows, you think: Here is a dark, grim record. “Bugging Out Again” better reflects the playfulness to come, but by the clunky “Back in the Game,” the duo’s mothballed productions feel laborious, faintly reminiscent of that awkward period when Damon Albarn was composing Gorillaz songs on his iPad.
Scrape away the opening suite’s permafrost and you have an album you can enjoy like an ice cream. New-wave mutant “Gangsters” is so melodically irresistible that the chorus of nefarious alien children invading Yorke’s vocal track would have little trouble amassing a stan army to conquer the world. “This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice” fulfills the prophecy of an old Radiohead concert review, in a 2000 issue of Q magazine, asserting that Yorke had debuted an electropop zinger indebted to Joe Jackson’s “Steppin’ Out.” (The original critic, alas, was describing “Everything in Its Right Place.”) The vaudevillian marching beat of “Happy Days” deploys a gleefully malevolent Yorke to chase up a mysterious accounting error. Each of these songs disconcerts in its own way—spectral arrangements, lyrics laced with eerie corporate euphemisms—but comes with a dopamine rush to help it go down. Sell us the dream, then show us the nightmare.
If anything, it is the concept of Tall Tales that threatens to slip between its authors’ fingers. As a DJ and producer, Pritchard can play music that raises the roof, frightens the ravers, or frightens the ravers and raises the roof anyway. Yorke would relish that sort of anything-goes approach, but he cannot get away from his shadow. He has to sing, he has to plug away at the business of being Thom Yorke. “We have an edge over all this other electronic music,” Nigel Godrich told OOR magazine in 2019. “We have Thom, we have his voice and what he can do, his melodic talents.” But a voice like Yorke’s creates an expectation: that emotions will rise and fall, that a money note will flutter from the sky and land snug in the finale’s back pocket. The money note is not what Yorke and Pritchard seek. They believe in a vibe economy: the underhand beat switch or seesawing synth buzz that shifts the energy just enough to wormhole us into the next verse.
Whether that is an asset or liability depends on your mileage for Yorke’s solo ventures. What Tall Tales lacks in razzle-dazzle it makes up for with risky maneuvers, particularly Yorke’s in the vocal booth—the latest in a freewheeling run from a singer who has spent the years since ANIMA concocting new ways to delight and disturb. Pritchard, beyond his handwork with analog synths and Arctic atmospheres, coaxes a sweet naivety out of his collaborator, reaffirming Yorke’s long-held faith in electronic music’s power to liberate: from rock orthodoxy, yes, but also the demand to be spectacular at all times. For all its maverick flair, this meeting of musical intellects feels just as innocuous as Yorke and Pritchard’s dinner back in 2012: a pair of guys immune to their own lore, with nothing to fear and not much left to doubt.
