Radiohead - all?

The second album The Smile seems to be preparing us for this. Tom York and Johnny Greenwood again recorded an excellent record in the new group

The Smile, Tom York, Johnny Greenwood and the drummer Tom Skinner, which joined them, released the second album Wall of Eyes. Tom York is in no hurry to declare that Radiohead is no longer there, but the group has not been new records of the group for almost six years, and in the world tour of 2024 the musician will go with The Smile. Critic Lev Gankin talks about the second plate The Smile and how the new group allowed York and Greenwood to return to experiments and lightness.

Today, apparently, we can already talk about this as a fact: among the victims of the Pandemia of Coronavirus, who did not fall into official statistics, the group of Radiohead turned out to be.

The last tour of the ensemble (in support of the album A Moon Shape Pool) ended in August 2018, plans for the next tour tore the widespread closure of the sites. A year later, when Radiohead was taken into the Hall of Glory of Rock-n Roll, at the ceremony from the group the drummer Phil Selevei and the guitarist Ed O` Brain-Tom York and the Greenwood brothers, ignored the event, ignored the ceremonies. Periodically, one of the musicians Radiohead are soothing mantras-they say that the ensemble still exists, joint activity remains on the agenda. But it seems that they are now more comfortable than together: O` Brain and Seleve are released solo albums, Colin Greenwood rides around the world as a participant in the tour of Nick Kave, and Johnny Greenwood and Tom York successfully voiced films. And yet - they play in The Smile.

Honestly, to see them on stage together, but not under the Sample Radiohead is still unusual, although The Smile has already been released a second full -format album - a year and a half after the first.

At the turn of the 1990–2000s, after the publication of the epoch-making album Ok Computer, Radiohead felt that they could say everything they could in the chosen form-and began to reinvent themselves again. The process was difficult, I can’t, but when it ended, the group found itself in a state of rapid creative take -off - literally gnawing in vivid ideas. Something similar is happening now: having started a site-project in quarantine times, the main characters seemed to take the weights from their feet and breathed in full chest: in The Smile, new material, according to the sensation, is born practically without effort, just have time to write down.

And the point is not a new composition, although Tom Skinner immediately came to the court, as if playing with York and Greenwood all his life, taken on board, as if he had been taken aboard. The main thing, apparently, in the fact that the duet from Radiohead dropped from itself the burden of expectations with which a priori is connected by any new release of their main ensemble. Instead of keeping an exam for compliance with high standards OK Computer, Kid A or In Rainbows (and not always withstand it - The Smile group with the group of The Smile, as if starting with a clean sheet, divided the critics and fans of the group of the group from a clean sheet.

Of course, in fact, it can only be called clean. It is worth sounding the first song with Wall of Eyes in a stumbling size of 5/4 (for fidelity, York will consider up to five directly into the microphone to the end of the track), as you catch yourself thinking: it was the same in In Rainbows with the composition of 15 STEP. In Friend of a Friend, an echo of Pyramid Song is heard, and the most monumental track in the album, Bending Hectic, with a great desire, is easy to place in a row set back in the 1990s with songs like Paranoid Android.

Johnny Greenwood is now everywhere with the orchestra - his cooperation with LCO (London orchestra of modern music) has already been one and a half years old; Symphony sound actively involves The Smile. Well, Tom York is Tom York. His folder-it seems to be brittle, almost incorporeal, but actually strong, flexible and confident-it is difficult to confuse with something, like patented sad statements: "We will raise the glasses for not earning <...> for grains of sand, waking up through the fingers." When the exclamations of "Baby, Baby!" In the spirit of countless rock vocalists of the past, starting with Robert Plant, you involuntarily wonder-what is he suddenly? What's happened? But then it turns out that this is not Baby, but Payback - “reckoning”, “retribution”. You can exhale: everything is in order.

And yet, for all the continuity in relation to the past creative experiences of York and Greenwood, The Smile also has an infectious discovered energy: Wall of Eyes-the work of artists who are definitely interested in being in the studio and trying something new. York here more often than usual goes to a low register, Greenwood-extracts hypnotic crowns from his guitar: the ending of the Read the Room and the middle part of Under the Pillows like outrs of some classical recording of Can or Neu!. The Smile behavior before the recording remote control resembles how they acted in The Beatles studio (by the way, the Wall of Eyes album was recorded on Ebbi Road) - everything that comes to their minds, you need to test, put it into business immediately. The lazy will not compare the orchestral bapto in the finale of the Friend of a Friend (and then another, even more spectacular, Bending Hectic) with the ending of the Beatle song a day in the Life. However, The Smile compositions with the best samples of psychedelic music of the 1960s are not only these episodes: in the culmination of the same Friend of a Friend, York's voice freezes on one note, while a rapidly harmonious movement occurs-like in the look at the Wind of a half-forgotten American group of the Fallen Angels.

The first album The Smile, A Light for Attragling Atting, lasted almost an hour and sounded a little patchwork: each song as an exercise in a new technique or a new style. Wall of Eyes is more compact and, in general, makes a more integral impression, although there are no less experiments in it - they are simply compressed in eight multifaceted, polystylic compositions that constantly change the appearance.

The entry to Bending Hectic, with the Greenwood microtonal party, sounding as if the musician twists the pins on the move, resembles the echo of the final clocks of Wall of Eyes with a collage that gradually filling the panorama, uncertain in height of guitar tones. The already mentioned uneven size 5/4 of the opening track returns - with other accents - in Under the Pillows and Friend of a Friend. Tileharmonic's sparse sound palette from the first side of the plate anticipates I Quit and You Know Me! - Two songs from the second side. And, on the contrary, a hard electri -guitar in the Read The Room seems to promise a coming explosion - and it really takes place in the culmination of Bending Hectic, where Greenwood cuts dystorshn and sweeps the strings, forcing to remember almost the Creep song.

If you try to describe Wall of Eyes in a word, then this will probably be the word "instability". “Will I live until the morning? I don’t know, ”York doubts about Teleharmonic, and the music throughout the record seeks to emphasize about the same emotions. Hence the odd, confused dimensions, unpredictably wandering harmony, systematically refuse to resolve in tonic, as well as bright solutions in arrangement, for example, intermittent, “glue” guitar in I QUIT, or at the very end of Read the Room, the instrumental row suddenly disappears in an airless space, devoid Supports (attentive listeners here can come to mind the old song Radiohead Lucky). Without commenting on the state of the surrounding world (the last thing it would be worth expecting from Greenwood and York, these are any statements “on the agenda”), they nevertheless fix and translate in the sound its rapidly progressive unreliable. It is worth the musicians in Wall of Eyes to find some sustainable drawing (whether it is a burden or a “logical”, a firmly standing chord sequence), as they immediately distort it, distort it-or simply throw it half a way.

Paradoxically, this feels hope. The need to look for a balance in conditions when the soil goes from under the feet, makes us move, move, in other words, live. Realizing that (temporarily?) They cannot work as an up -up, the usual quintet under the Radiohead banner, the group members saw in the current situation a new opportunity and interpreted it as a source of inspiration.

The Smile records sometimes resemble the former group of York and Greenwood in the particularities-but they have a completely different organic, for which you probably need to say special thanks to that skinner with his in-law free, resourceful rhythm party, as well as producer Sam Petesu-Davis, who replaced Wall of Eyes Closure Radiohead's ally to Niedla Godrich. As before, it will no longer be, as if Johnny Greenwood, Tom York and joined them, are telling us. Everything has changed. But the chance to write a new story, no worse than the previous one, no one will take away from us.

Lev Gankin