Two albums in a year, something very 70s, something that today seems unthinkable in this era of releases often spaced even 4 or 5 years apart. What led to the increasingly spaced-out releases over the decades and what the hell bands (as they were called back then) had 50 years ago to be so hyperactive and prolific, I honestly couldn't explain, I'll leave the task to expert musicologists. The fact is that at the beginning of 2024, while I was engaged in listening to "Wall of Eyes," I certainly did not expect to deal with another Smile album by the end of the year.
Well, it’s material from the same sessions as "Wall of Eyes" and some tracks were already ready and presented live between 2021 and 2022. In any case, let me say that "Cutouts" is an incredibly misleading title, in that it does not reflect at all what awaits the listener, a title that risks belittling the content and causing one to truly believe they are dealing with literal scraps, essentially collectors' items; and instead no, on the contrary, they are not "cutouts" or "scraps," it is an album that shines with its own light, full of life and boasting a very strong identity. I would even say it's better, more varied, and inspired than "Wall of Eyes," if the intent was to tease us, they succeeded brilliantly (actually the title is inspired by something else entirely, but that's another story).
An album rich with varied and contrasting moments, rock as always experimental but not easy to classify. It shifts from the fast and frenetic math-rock of "Zero Sum" and "Eyes & Mouth" to tracks that lean on faint electronics to then develop into more rock, as happens in "The Slip" and "No Words." Sometimes hypnotic solutions are built from an electric skeleton as in "Colours Fly," sometimes everything rests on a well-floating acoustic base as in "Bodies Laughing." However, the real gems are others. "Foreign Spies" dazzles with its glaring synth bursts, "Instant Psalm" stuns with its hallucinatory orchestral solutions, so adept at sounding classic yet psychedelic at the same time; "Tiptoe," on the other hand, unsettles with its precise and successful interplay between jazz piano touches and sweetly disorienting strings. The most surprising track, however, is "Don’t Get Me Started," which, with its peculiar scales of sinister and jazzy electronic notes, gives the idea of a dark staircase to climb.
Recently, during a social media debate, my cousin from Copenhagen shed light on the differences between Smile and Radiohead that initially eluded me: he identified, for instance, a fuller and more rock drum sound in Smile, contrasting with the more hypnotic, obsessive, and electronic one of Radiohead, the same goes for the bass riffs, which in Smile sound more vintage and rock, while in Radiohead they are more dub and obsessive; now that the ideas are a bit clearer, I could add other observations myself, for example, Smile has more math-rock, indie, and post-punk influences.
But it doesn't matter if we are facing Radiohead 2.0 or not, the important thing is that we are once again in front of another truly inspired and noteworthy work. And anyway, it seems that Radiohead really are about to return.
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