I’ve got an admission: I never really got Radiohead, in no small part because of Thom Yorke’s singing. I appreciate his technical abilities and songwriting, and that a lot of people find his anguish cathartic, but the more he goes for it the more I switch off.
Even in gentler and less rockist songs he tends to go for a keening sound that still jangles my nerves. Rather like Paul Weller (not someone I imagine he’s compared to very often) straining to express intensity seems to have become a vital part of his musical brand, but just like Weller, I infinitely prefer it when he sits back a bit and just sings.
That’s why A Moon Shaped Pool is my favourite Radiohead album. And it’s one of many reasons why this collaborative record is a treat. Yorke and Mark Pritchard have history – the Somerset-via-Sydney electronic musician remixed Radiohead in 2011 and Yorke featured on his radiophonic psychdedelic folk song “Beautiful People” in 2016 – and their long-distance working process is clearly a natural one for both. In fact, it’s so natural, each has adapted to the other so naturally, that this really feels like a symbiosis: like a whole new “band”.
Pritchard these days, uses a lot of retro electronic kit, which when used for songs naturally recalls darker, stranger corners of early electropop like Throbbing Gristle’s more structured tracks, Chris & Cosey, Soft Cell or early Eurythmics at their most introspective, and there’s a general air of gloom and menace. The expansive, organically-sprawling song structures, though, make it feel altogether outside of influence, and Yorke adapts his voice both in terms of adopting characters and with electronic processing, to create immense range of colour within that.
There’s more psyche-folk influence (unsurprisingly, in “The Men Who Dance in Stag's Heads”), there’s sardonic oompah pop (“Happy Days” with its bleak “death and taxes” refrain), there are beatless soundscapes (“Ice Shelf” and the periodically heavenly closer “Wandering Genie”). And Yorke’s voice does some surprising things – even sounding like Neil Tennant at his most elegiac in the opener “A Fake in a Faker’s World”. Even when he’s at his most “Thom Yorke”, on the centrepiece “The Spirit”, every time you think he might start pushing at a note, he holds it down, resulting in a song that is, frankly, heart-rending. Altogether, a glorious synergy, and a sterling example of how subtlety can be more powerful.
Listen to “The Spirit”:
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