“Don't think you know me,” Thom Yorke intones near the end of Smile's second studio album, “Wall of Eyes.” And he adds: “Don't think I'm everything you say I am.” With their new LP, Smile becomes more and more elusive. Now it is a band that tries to destabilize structures and dissolve expectations.
The Smile is still undeniably a Radiohead spin-off. This is the trio formed by Yorke and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead, with British jazz drummer Tom Skinner. Yorke's tormented vocals have been kept direct, and the songwriting leans toward Radiohead's dissonances, strange rhythms, and totally enveloping aura of anxiety.
The Smile's 2022 debut album, “A Light for Attracting Attention,” and its live recordings featured what was mostly a stripped-down, cerebrally twisted funk band, similar to Yorke's 2012 project, Atoms for Peace, which had Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers on bass. But on “Wall of Eyes,” the smile questions and undermines its rhythms. The band often lets them emerge only gradually, then deflates or obscures them in complex and confusing productions.
In Smile's new songs, solid foundation (verbal or musical) is rare and precarious. The priority is atmosphere, not readability. Yorke's lyrics are fragmentary and somber, full of apocalyptic news. “Soon you'll be there/in all that fire and ice,” he sings on “Teleharmonic,” over chords that keep slipping beneath him. The album’s most coherent narrative, “Bending Hectic,” are the final words of a driver navigating the hairpin curves of an Italian mountain road and then “let go of the wheel.” The track is an eight-minute exercise in suspended time, meditating on two slowly alternating chords before plunging into a cacophony of hard rock guitars.
Greenwood has long been a composer of film scores, including “There Will Be Blood,” “Phantom Thread” and “The Power of the Dog,” and the new songs on Smile allow themselves to be as amorphous and open-ended as the music of a movie. . It's not about hooks or choruses. The melodies repeat while the arrangements change radically around them; The songs suddenly jump into completely new territory.
“Read the Room” begins with prickly guitar arpeggios and a sizzling beat, veers into a nice bridge that doesn't stay that way, and spends its final two minutes simmering over a completely different riff. “Under Our Pillows,” which may be a rebuke to social media – “You give freely/Nowadays everyone can share,” Yorke chides – begins with crisp cross-rhythms: hopscotch guitar plucking and a contrapuntal bass line over Skinner's stop-start. patter. But the momentum changes, the odd meter becomes a driving 4/4 and then retreats into choppy, measureless spaces. For a full minute, the track is edgy but ambient. Throughout the album, Smile's music feels cast and improvised, yet clearly premeditated.
Greenwood's film scores often use orchestral arrangements, as does Smile. Half of the album's new songs are overlaid with strings played by the London Contemporary Orchestra, occasionally for sumptuousness, but more often to create tension and harmonic ambiguity. Some songs end with a full minute of murky orchestral sounds, each one calibrated.
Perhaps Radiohead's internal decision-making became too burdensome or complicated. It is easier to work as a trio than as an artistic institution, but one that is highly scrutinized and full of scenarios. In “Friend of a Friend,” Yorke sings, “I can go wherever I want/I just have to turn around and go back to the front.” For The Smile, that could be a mission statement, of a band determined to evolve in their own way.
The smile
“Wall of eyes”
(SG)
