Thom Yorke is in Radio-head. Radiohead is probably the biggest rock band in the world. Therefore, anything Thom Yorke says or does will be interpreted by much of the world as absolutely crucial to the future of pop music as we know it. Insatiable followers read the production blog for the new Radiohead album (which is still a year from being released, by the way) like it’s the Daily News. Music schools teach entire classes about the band. Some fans with nothing better to do are still hanging around message boards trying to decipher the cryptic artwork of the hidden liner notes in early pressings of Kid A.
The massive aura about the band makes it a bit strange that their lead singer’s first solo record is a modest, even a little shallow affair. Yorke alone, aided by longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, deals in drum machines, piano, synthesizers, his notoriously spacey voice, and not much else. He’s skilled enough at computer manipulation to get a great deal of variety from these few tools, and the sparseness is actually refreshing after hearing Radiohead’s attempt at a “return to form” going hit-or-miss on their last record. The Eraser more resembles the electronic tracks on Amnesiac — simple and still song-centric, but uniquely fitted to Yorke’s paranoid, quavering personality
The songs themselves are only decent, though. Yorke’s lyrics have never been taken for poetry, but here they sound particularly tossed off. On top of that, most tracks are built around single riffs repeated for four minutes at a time, building with either a bed of synth noise or a bunch of multilayered vocals. It all comes across sounding slick, but think about it — if Thom Yorke can’t learn a lesson from the Postal Service, then who can? This should probably go without saying, but The Eraser doesn’t even come close to the high points of the Radiohead catalog. It might be a superb holdover until next year’s comeback, but it probably won’t prove to be much more.
The massive aura about the band makes it a bit strange that their lead singer’s first solo record is a modest, even a little shallow affair. Yorke alone, aided by longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, deals in drum machines, piano, synthesizers, his notoriously spacey voice, and not much else. He’s skilled enough at computer manipulation to get a great deal of variety from these few tools, and the sparseness is actually refreshing after hearing Radiohead’s attempt at a “return to form” going hit-or-miss on their last record. The Eraser more resembles the electronic tracks on Amnesiac — simple and still song-centric, but uniquely fitted to Yorke’s paranoid, quavering personality
The songs themselves are only decent, though. Yorke’s lyrics have never been taken for poetry, but here they sound particularly tossed off. On top of that, most tracks are built around single riffs repeated for four minutes at a time, building with either a bed of synth noise or a bunch of multilayered vocals. It all comes across sounding slick, but think about it — if Thom Yorke can’t learn a lesson from the Postal Service, then who can? This should probably go without saying, but The Eraser doesn’t even come close to the high points of the Radiohead catalog. It might be a superb holdover until next year’s comeback, but it probably won’t prove to be much more.
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