‘Harrowdown Hill’ is taken from THOM YORKE’S album ‘The Eraser’.
Side projects aside, this came as quite a shock to me (probably because the last Radiohead material I really listened to was from The Bendz – quite some time ago!). Those more familiar with the solo work of this international superstar may be less surprised by the electronic pulses – here warped until they resemble a church organ’s melancholy echo.
Other features I knew well, and recognised. The paranoid vocal urgency and the machine-gun guitar sound are still there, but those years in the global limelight (Radiohead are just back from America, and about to tour Europe) point to either one of two sorry inevitabilities. Brief periods of experimentation with the band’s sound have been safe, as it just wouldn’t do to rock the MTV/commercial radio boat too much (if at all). So the boat is not rocked.
What to do? Now every self respecting megastar has the license to ‘cut loose’ via the now proverbial ‘side project’. Yet even allowing for this, there doesn’t seem to me much in the way of a change of direction. I doubt very much whether it’s in Thom Yorke’s hands anyway – at the kind of level he’s now working at, artistic decisions are already set in stone. There is only a murky, half-living ode to telepathy and – irony of ironies, it’s beyond his control. Has he read my mind (talent, creative genius)? Or is this track just one long, sorry and self-reflexive excuse for itself (Damn good PR)?
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I never went overboard on the band to start with – I remember what nice lads they were, clean cut, who thanked you for turning up to watch them support the likes of The Frank and Walters as they emerged swiftly in 1992, seemingly from nowhere. Their straight up, string snapping rock delivery was honest and passionate then. This, forgive me, is a non-event. Either that or a desperate attempt to be low-key again. It falls so far short of the mark that it beggars belief.
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