The Eraser
(XL)



As if it wasn’t already a struggle to fit Thom Yorke’s pet peeves on a piece of A4 paper, Radiohead’s frontman was swift to issue a warning with the news that he had made an album. Speaking on the band’s website, he declared that: “I don’t wanna hear that word solo.” Weeks before the release of a record written by Yorke, sung by Yorke and credited to Yorke, this was not unproblematic. What could The Eraser possibly be, other than Thom Yorke’s first solo album? Listen to the sinuous electronic funk of these nine songs and the answer soon becomes obvious. Thom Yorke’s second solo album.

Well, he could have hardly called it Kid B, could he? Maybe not. And yet the thing about The Eraser that is most immediately apparent — at least, to anyone familiar with Kid A — is its sonic kinship with Radiohead’s 2000 opus. Evoking the childlike piano/beats interplay of the Kid A opener Everything in its Right Place, the title track has Yorke inquiring: “Are you only being nice because you want something?” over pretty Satie-ish chords.

As befits their creation — alone with a little subsequent fixing up from Nigel Godrich — many of these songs sound like the digitised transcribings of a soul in retreat from the waking world — at times panicking, at times sleepy. Occasionally, as on The Clock, it’s both at the same time.

A three-note bassline pushes a muffled jackhammer beat that wears its melody as restlessly as a hair-shirt. Anyone in search of something “classically” Radiohead may elect to stay away — but if they don’t, they’ll be pleasantly surprised by Black Swan, whose insistant guitar phrase shares most of its DNA with Amnesiac’s token rock song I Might Be Wrong.

So much then for the state-of-the-art software that allowed Yorke to give birth to these songs on a laptop without, presumably, waking up his children. Anyone who spent unhealthy amounts of their childhood listening to early OMD albums and Gary Numan B-sides will get a pang of déjà vu at the slurring, digital oscillations of Skip Divided and Harrowdown Hill. No criticism intended here — they’ve rarely sounded as apt as they do on the latter song, which takes its title from the location where the weapons inspector and Government scientist David Kelly ended his life.

The fly of apocalyptic portent has been buzzing inside Yorke’s head since the days when the BBC terrified schoolchildren with nuclear-winter dramas such as Threads and comics divined entire routines from Protect and Survive manuals. The precise details of that unease may change from song to song, but the sentiment remains the same. If such Radiohead tunes as Paranoid Android, Sit Down Stand Up and Sail to the Moon are anything to go by, Yorke has spent the past decade preparing for a biblical flood. And fittingly. The Eraser’s best song is another told-you-so for future generations, in which bust- ling beats and alien chords defer to an oddly euphoric memoir from the moment of reckoning: “The worms come out to see what’s up.”

What, you wonder, will the rest of Radiohead make of it all — this album which took root in one of Yorke’s frequent periods of ambivalence towards the day job? Historically, solo albums have tended to grow out of cracks in dried-up bands. In the case of Radiohead though, The Eraser might just constitute a lifeline. If this outlet aids their rediscovery of a common purpose, Yorke’s bandmates may be only too happy to give him custody of the Kids.

PETE PAPHIDES