Thom Yorke
The Eraser

THE REVIEW

INTRODUCTION:
The Radiohead are an excellent band, among the best of the past three/four decades. Their music is very fascinating, the symbolic and musical references could drive any fan crazy, they are excellent musicians and the overall result is always effective and interesting, Thom York's voice is magnetic and just sufficiently tormented to grip anyone by the stomach, and, last but not least, they are among the few bands that have never been static but continue to dare to get their hands dirty with more or less new but always alien music.
This is precisely what makes you love a band: seeing and above all feeling that they don't always dish out the same old thing. The commitment and the desire to always challenge themselves are the best aspects of this band. Clearly, maintaining high quality in a journey that freely mixes pop, rock, psychedelia, and electronic is not easy, but having a vast fan base helps especially if, after a masterpiece like 'Ok Computer,' they seek new paths because now with rock, everything has been done.
And it's precisely this mixing with electronic, mainly of the Warp school ('Geogaddi' teaches), that doesn’t convince me. I may be blasphemous, but after the above-mentioned album, Radiohead stopped thrilling me, although they still surprised me (it's always nice to see someone manage to blend naturally chilly electronica with so much emotion): for example, I find 'Kid A' an excellent album but nothing more, I find it deeply mistaken to crown it as a masterpiece when it reworks musical forms already in vogue with a snobbish attitude. That said, I approach without any prejudice Thom Yorke's solo work, who is the singer and leader of Radiohead.
END OF INTRODUCTION

What can one expect from this album: sparse and tormented folk (like Eddie Vedder’s solo album could be)? Dark experimental sounds? A single, relentless drone for forty minutes? A huge joke of farts on a drum?
None of that: the coordinates of 'The Eraser' remain in the realm of the more electronic side of Radiohead, while winking at the smudged melodies of Notwist. I would be inclined to speak of apocalyptic folktronica. The dominant elements are minimal beats, beautiful piano melodies, a voice of a disgruntled angel on judgment day, and a very polished production (actually too much, it is perhaps the same flaw that flattens Beck's Sea Change, also produced by Godrich); sometimes stronger bass and rhythms elbow their way through, and those are the moments when the album amazes.

Take the transgenic blues of And It Rained All Night and you'll feel true emotion, a compelling rhythm, and an atmosphere at once dreamy, tormented, and ready to fight for the future. Or Harrowdown Hill, almost funk-like, in its progression through a post-atomic desert.
Indeed, terms such as post-atomic or apocalyptic come to mind when listening to this work, a dark and rather sharp work as I did not expect, reaching its peak in the dragged-out and lyrically artificial conclusion of Cymbal Rush.

A literary comparison that jumps into my mind is with certain works of Ballard, suspended on the future, pessimistic and hopeful only in the disillusionment of reason just like this excellent album that does not stray from the Radiohead tradition but travels alongside it like a rather bright comet.