Thom Yorke has always struggled with the standard cycles placed on artists by the music industry. Write, record, release – repeat, ad infinitum. He’s always been drawn more to the jazz world, or to club culture, favouring something fluid. In that way, The Smile makes perfect sense. A collaboration with old sparring partner Jonny Greenwood, drummer Tom Skinner has bona fide jazz chops, having helmed down percussion with Mercury nominated outfit Sons Of Kemet (amongst others). Debut album ‘A Light For Attracting Attention’ was wonderful, the tension between artifact and performance making for something much more fully realised that a rock star side hustle.
Follow-up ‘Wall Of Eyes’ has a lot to live up to, then. The band’s debut brought a period of hectic touring, with live performances finding The Smile dropping in new material. Favouring a porous rejection of release formats, live shows became experiments, the petri dish of improvisation allowing the trio to test out what works in real-time.
As such, ‘Wall Of Eyes’ isn’t so much a distillation of that pattern but a continuation of it. A record that feels like the stopping off point of a journey, it bristles with invention, and the sheer joy of music making, while being pinned in one place by the sort of emotional gravitas Thom Yorke’s vocals have risen to claim as their own. Seriously, the man could make your shopping list sound like a treatise on modern day alienation.
The songwriting on display here, though, is wonderful. Opening with the title song, ‘Wall Of Eyes’ (the track) lures you in from the off, the choppy guitar line overlaid with orchestral spasms. ‘Teleharmonic’ opens in wonderfully understated fashion, rising from the depths to take form in front of your eyes, the spartan percussion managing to conjure something hugely visual.
‘Read The Room’ returns the trio to a sense of directness, one of the album’s more direct rock moments, if still ultimately oblique. ‘Under Our Pillows’ opens with math-like acute angles, Jonny Greenwood’s inventive approach to the guitar as a machine for constructing noise showing to have no end.
‘Friend Of A Friend’ is rather more plaintive, an old school Thom Yorke piano ballad of the kind he has long since mastered. The ever-undulating ‘I Quit’ points to the loose improvisation of their live shows, and this sense of dynamic also drives ‘Bending Hectic’ – luring into the depths, before crushing you with volume.
A record of real depth, ‘Wall Of Eyes’ closes on a sombre note. Distinctive, melodic, and defined, ‘You Know Me’ doesn’t so much pull at the heartstrings as slice right through them, Thom Yorke’s voice dissolving into a mesh of strings. It’s a suitably potent moment to end the record on – poised and suggestive, it becomes a bridge from one phase, to something as yet uncharted.
At a recent Q&A in London The Smile hinted that a third record is already well under way. Packed with ideas and unique sense of character, ‘Wall Of Eyes’ highlights the stunning musicality that bonds these three audio technicians; a record defined by a curious sense of tension, it makes for immaculate listening.
8/10
Words: Robin Murray
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