Wall of Eyes
By The Smile
The solo projects of Radiohead members in the eight years since their last album, A Moon-Shaped Pool, have delivered mixed results. The most consistent have come from Jonny Greenwood (soundtracks for Phantom Thread and The Power of the Dog among them) and Thom Yorke’s experimental electronica album Anima and the Suspiria soundtrack.
The Smile are Yorke, Greenwood and drummer Tom Skinner, co-founder of Sons of Kemet and with a lengthy discography of appearances in numerous contemporary British avant-jazz outfits.
They broke cover with A Light for Attracting Attention (2022) which defied easy categorisation. Yorke’s signature angst and social unease was often transmitted as dreamy soulful weariness as Skinner’s dextrous rhythms uncoupled the music from rock tropes in songs embellished by strings and brass.
Warm hasn’t been an adjective often applied to Radiohead, but it was appropriate for the group’s debut.
This follow-up confirms The Smile as more than just a lockdown project but a band with an independent vision and offering unexpected arrangements: the title track’s Latin shuffle; Friend of a Friend recalling 70s sensitive singer-songwriters and early solo McCartney but disrupted by Skinner and the sweep of disturbing strings (think the Beatles’ A Day in the Life).
The lyrically unsettling eight-minute Bending Hectic – a woozy ballad-into-searing-Radiohead-rock – was debuted at the 2022 Montreux Jazz Festival and, as on Friend of a Friend, Greenwood also taps into Bernard Herrmann for the staggered strings.
The detail in Wall of Eyes means a double header where electronica rubs against unearthly echoed vocals and choral expansiveness (Teleharmonic). And despite Yorke writing I Quit, you feel other Radioheaders should start polishing up further solo material.
Half their band is out on its own.
People Who Aren’t There Any More
By Future Islands
If The Smile embraces risk and experimentation, few would claim the same for Baltimore’s successful electro-pop outfit Future Islands, who often have the musical presence of an anonymous prog-rock band taking itself very seriously indeed.
On this, their seventh album, frontman/writer Samuel T Herring immerses himself in the emotional fallout of a recent break-up: “I am waiting, I’m not breaking I lie, tell myself, ‘it’s okay’, when it’s not quite” on The Tower; “When I’m stuck inside this room without you and you’re still asleep, I’m like a prowling lion (Deep in the Night); “I’m just an animal that strains against my line. I push and pull the cord, to make me feel alive. I had to fight to wrest the reins back on my life” (Give Me the Ghost Back). And so on.
Herring – also an actor – delivers every emotion as if it’s on the surface of his skin. It makes for performative sincerity and is often akin to overwrought am-dram theatrics by a hollowed-out Fine Young Cannibals.
The first-person emotions driving these relentlessly earnest and therapeutic lyrics arrive atop widescreen 1980s synth landscapes (Corner of My Eye) or to driving dance beats. Despite that, over the long haul, this is enervating.
These albums are available digitally, on vinyl and CD. Future Islands is also on cassette.
