While the task of consistently delivering on adjacent projects under the prowess of the Radiohead name seems a near impossible feat to muster, Yorke and Greenwood prove yet again that their creative efforts are not to be dismissed as lukewarm side projects. Luke Bower shares his thoughts on the awaited and anticipated Wall of Eyes.
The new record follows promptly from the band’s debut A Light for Attracting Attention, and with it brings a consistent narrative and instrumental cohesion that was perhaps absent from this first record, which instead favoured a whiplash inducing array of energetic, kraut-infused rhythms interjected with nuanced ballads that perhaps doesn’t quite live up to the sum of its parts.
On Wall of Eyes, The Smile effortlessly intersect folk, prog and jazz to compose a new-found nuance to their already reinventive evolution of the formidable Radiohead formula. Its performances never give out, with Greenwood’s compositional experience paving the way for the group’s instrumentation to consistently deliver throughout its runtime. Interestingly, the record opens with two of its more subdued cuts with its title track and Teleharmonic, the latter of which presenting the band at its best. Spearheaded by Yorke’s reverberating falsetto harmonies, the track infiltrates its sonic landscapes via its driving bassline and the nestling in of Skinner’s drumming. It’s clear here, and especially so on album highlight Friend of a Friend, that Skinner accompanies the masterful work of Yorke and Greenwood to a dizzyingly excellent degree, no doubt taken from his expertise demonstrated through his prominence in the British jazz ensemble Sons of Kemet, with his flourishes and passages weaving in and out of the track in the vacant pockets of its 5/4-time signature.
Under our Pillows acts as the spiritual successor to Thin Thing from their debut, with an opening riff that sounds almost all too familiar, and yet the track crafts a multi-phase sonic complexity that ends in an unfamiliar and forbidding synth arrangement that feels as though it has been ripped right from a Kubrick film, again showing the ability of the band to constantly one-up themselves.
Deeper cuts I Quit and You Know Me! favour simplicity and instrumental subtlety to let Yorke’s lyricism and vocals shine once again, with the closing track leaving us with an unmistakable emotional poignancy that Yorke will forever have the ability to achieve on each new release and ending with a masterfully alluring string section.
Bending Hectic feels like the necessary crescendo to the tension the record has been covertly building thus far; an amalgamation of Radiohead’s foundational guitar driven intensity and its member’s fully realised appreciation for subtlety - think Just meets True Love Waits and cuts from Yorke’s solo work. Both Greenwood’s guitar and Yorke’s vocal wails in its back half offer a ferocity that seems welcomely absurd for musicians this far into their career.
Wall of Eyes sees an eclectic display of musicianship from The Smile, with a technicality and prudence that should near diminish the fanbase yearning for a new Radiohead project.
Luke Bower
Edited by Natalie Howarth
Featured Image from The Smile's Wall of Eyes Official Album Cover. No changes were made to this image.
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