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Five years after the successful “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes” and just eight months after the soundtrack for the “Suspiria” remake (signed by Luca Guadagnino), with little notice and practically a surprise, a new solo work by Thom Yorke has been released.
It's called “Anima,” produced by the loyal and now essential Nigel Godrich, and was preceded by an original and innovative promotional campaign as per the tradition of the house (a series of posters hung around the world advertising a fictional company – “Anima Technologies” – promising the recovery of lost dreams through a “dream camera”; the posters feature a phone number, and calling it plays a part of the track “Not The News”).
The album emerged from a period during which the British frontman suffered from writer’s block, and is nothing more than a continuation of the discourse started with “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes,” and (as expected from Yorke) is an extreme version of it, representing another step forward towards the deconstruction of the song form. The tracks are a collection of sound fragments that Yorke sent to Godrich for reworking and combining; Godrich then sent the processed material back to the Radiohead leader, who instilled vocal lines in his typical fragmented and claustrophobic style (“Traffic,” “Twist”).
There are few moments of quiet (the monotone lament of “Dawn Chorus,” the vaguely club-like pulsing “I Am A Very Rude Person,” fabulous) amidst a sea of electro sound shards, frenetic synthesizers (“Last I Heard… (He Was Circling The Rain)”) and pulses that seem to come from distant planets (the “single” “Not The News”).
Only two tracks feature a “real” drummer: “The Axe” (a classic piece where Yorke laments his uncertain relationship with technology), with Joey Waronker from Atoms For Peace, and the intense “Impossible Knots,” enriched by the accelerated drumming of none other than Phil Selway from Radiohead. It closes with “Runwayaway,” and the chaos (finally) fully erupts.
“Anima” is an excellent album, adding yet another brick to the journey of exploration embarked upon by good old Thom. We’ll see where this leads in the event of a new discographic adventure from the parent band Radiohead.
Best track: I Am A Very Rude Person
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By POLO
The album is really pretentious and stupid rubbish, the usual sonic mess of vocalizations and disjointed electronics, without coherence or harmony.
It’s like putting two people in a room who, instead of making love, practice solitary autoeroticism without touching or even looking at each other.
