Throughout the album, Greenwood's guitars and arrangements oscillate between Can's warehouse expressionism and Robert Wyatt's alien-abducted folk fusion, conspiring with the live production and pounding beats to save his partner from the most his heavy impulses. Yorke's ethereal vocal range has long been his calling card and crutch, tested to vertiginous effect in his lyrics “Climbing the wallsbefore it takes root The King of Edges. These days, he's torn between conflicting urges to command a song or spray it with fantasy steam. But even his weakest spells enchant, and Eye wall opens with two irresistible slow burners: the wintry bossa nova title track, where he mutters about digital surveillance and repression (“Will you go behind a wall of eyes/From your own device/Are you still the hollow-eyed one?” ), and 'Teleharmonic', from 'All I need» school of tumultuous storytellers caught in synthetic hot tubs, clinging to love like a lifeline.
With the sequence of the two haziest songs up front, the album sweeps you into a trance. Then Greenwood's side-ragged guitar electrifies the nerve center on “Read the Room” and “Under Our Pillows,” an alt-rock suite with piston bites and a motorcycle finale. When the tension rises with a music box melody or London Contemporary Orchestra swells, the songs have surprised us twice: first by thwarting expectations of beauty, then by delivering it anyway.
Side two's tour-de-luxe falters only on “I Quit,” one of those Smile songs that might suffer from Greenwood's album-the-smile-3036092″ class=”external-link” data-event-click=”{"element":"ExternalLink","outgoingURL":"https://www.nme.com/news/music/jonny-greenwood-spencer-soundtrack-interview-radiohead-new-album-the-smile-3036092"}” href=”https://www.nme.com/news/music/jonny-greenwood-spencer-soundtrack-interview-radiohead-new-album-the-smile-3036092″ rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>wish to release records “90 percent as good [that] you go out twice as often.” Where the catch closer “You Know Me!” evolves Yorke's paranoid ballad, “I Quit” is the discount “Code” the “Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor»: heady as ever, but without the final apocalypse – the sense of dawn breaking through some dark underworld – that tilts these Radiohead songs into the sublime.
After decades of refining, rejecting and reshaping Radiohead's sound, Yorke and Greenwood seem brave enough to stop resisting – to relax and let their songwriting impulses absorb whatever's playing in their stereo that day. Eye wall it spotlights jazz, kosmische, prog — aesthetic guides and satellite genres usually kept in the wings of the more established band. Smile, though stranger and wilder, fit more comfortably into the omnivorous art-rock tradition.
Greenwood's fusion of sophistication and rebellion echoes his own beloved Pianist Glenn Gould, who once made a fine observation about the pioneering modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg: “Whenever one frankly defies a tradition, one becomes, in fact, more responsible for it.” Just as Radiohead defied rock convention, Smile cannot help but defy Radiohead. Yet contempt, Gould suggests, is the soul of tradition. Defying classicism or rock or a favorite old band can ultimately preserve their sanctity. The defied thing endures—and then, if we're lucky, the defiance provokes it to react.
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