The Smile’s second album Wall of Eyes, released in January, is a thrillingly discomfiting album by Radiohead alumni Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner. It has a coherent mood and flow, a great screw-the-musicbiz rock song in “Read the Room”, and a scintillator for all seasons in “Bending Hectic”.
Their latest, Cutouts, feels more ad hoc – Yorke’s non-narrative lyrics are some of his most abstruse, the tunes have stripped-down melodies, and the sequencing of the tracks seems random. Weirdly, it’s an album without an identifiable atmosphere, its jazzy experimentalism mostly militating against Yorke’s trademark melancholy and fatalism.
All that might be intentional – a resistance of categorisation, a breaking loose, a defiance of what’s expected, as Kid A was to OK Computer. Only the guys themselves can say. Maybe they make the music they make as it occurs to them, without a master plan, and roll it out for listeners to cherry pick and self-curate from, as many will on Spotify.
Wall of Eyes and Cutouts were produced by Sam Petts-Davies at the same sessions, so it’s a lightning fast followup – as Amnesiac was to Kid A. But whereas Amnesiac, which had “Pyramid Song”, “Morning Bell/Amnesiac”, and “Knives Out”, sustained its predecessor’s rhythmic focus and electronic timbres, Cutouts lacks Wall of Eyes’ verve and intensity.
It’s not without beauty or technical brilliance, of course. Yorke’s singing on “Foreign Spies” and “Instant Psalm” – slumbrous, synthy dirges, the latter embroidered with rippling strings – has that uncanny sense of intimacy that makes each listener sound like the only listener (a gift shared by Billie Eilish). The same goes for the delicate “Tiptoe”, on which the strings sound like waves breaking on a deserted beach.
Greenwood’s guitar playing on “Zero Sum”, “Colours Fly” (which goes pleasantly haywire), and “Eyes & Mouth” have the speed and dexterity of John McLaughlin’s, but the songs themselves are – to these ears – low in emotion, for all of Yorke’s heartfelt wailing. “No Words” chugs along nicely, Skinner and Greenwood’s metronomic playing picking up the beat from a synth-splashed tune that sounds like a speeded-up version of Carl Orff’s “Gassenhauer” (the famous xylophone theme of Badlands and True Romance).
What’s the real problem here? Maybe we've been spoiled. Cutouts sounds a bit inconsequential, whereas virtually everything Radiohead, The Smile, and Yorke have done previously has touched the sublime. But let’s give it time.
