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.
