IN REVIEW: The Smile - "A Light for Attracting Attention"

 

The prospect of a new Radiohead album is exciting to a lot of people, especially considering their last album (the majestic, orchestral A Moon Shaped Pool) has been with us for six years now, and every minute that ticks by extends the longest gap fans have gone without a new Radiohead album. Moreover, fans of their more rock-oriented material are now just about fifteen years removed from In Rainbows, the last Radiohead record that found them utilizing rock instrumentation in more or less the way you’d expect them to; and believe me, I know enough about how transcendent they are in terms of genre placement to have to word the previous sentence like that.

So, when The Smile (if you weren’t familiar, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood with Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner) dropped their debut single You Will Never Work In Television Again early this year, the slashing guitars and visceral Thom Yorke vocal raised the eyebrows of most Radiohead fans. That pummeling post-punk rager turns out to be just one of The Smile’s many flavours, as evidenced by A Light for Attracting Attention, the manifestation of lockdown-induced creative sessions between the band and longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich.

The shape shifting nature of this record can be illustrated by the variety exhibited in its pre release singles; in addition to the fiery You Will Never Work In Television Again, there’s the bassy, nocturnal groove of The Smoke, the subdued and gorgeous Skrting On the Surface, the unsettling piano-lead cinematic dirge Pana-Vision, the sullen acoustic ballad Free In the Knowledge, and the off-kilter and polyrhythmic Thin Thing. All six singles offer a different angle of the boundless creative dynamic the members of the band and their producer share (it helps that three out of four involved parties have been creating some of music’s most ingenious and important works for a quarter century or thereabouts), and establish a good template for what to expect, as the remaining seven tracks mostly work within these parameters.

Try as listeners might, it’s hard not to draw comparisons between the songs on A Light for Attracting Attention and the discography of Radiohead unless, through some incredible witchcraft and/or happenstance, you've avoided them for the last three decades or so; viewed under this lens, much of the album plays like a fan’s nostalgia trip wet dream. If you like, you can stick pretty much all Radiohead or Radiohead-adjacent projects’ album covers from OK Computer onward (including Thom Yorke's solo work and his underrated Atoms for Peace record) up on a cork board and criss-cross the hell out of them with push pins and string as you listen; you’ll hear much of the same tension, groove, raw emotion and majesty that’s punctuated Thom Yorke’s journey throughout. The same goes for the atmospheric, intricate guitar work of Greenwood (augmented with notes of his scoring work), and the uncanny ear of Godrich, which seems to always know which recipe brings out the most taste. You’ll have to forgive me for not being as familiar with Skinner’s work, but I take it on faith that he’s also in top form here.

Even though Radiohead obviously looms large over this album, I don’t want to sell it short by boiling it down to “songs that kind of sound like Radiohead”, mostly because Radiohead couldn’t (or, perhaps, wouldn’t) make a record that sounds like this in 2022. To pigeonhole the project as that also does a disservice to Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien and Philip Selway; their contributions are just as important to Radiohead’s sound and success, and I don’t want to undersell Tom Skinner’s drumming as lesser because it isn’t the same as Selway’s. Instead, I’ll conclude by hailing A Light to Attract Attention as an engaging and rewarding album whether you’re a fan of the involved parties or not; at the very least, don’t make the mistake of thinking of this as a mere side project, because it’s got more than enough sharp songwriting and quality performance to stand on its own.

May 13, 2022 • Self Help Tapes/XL
Highlights The Opposite • You Will Never Work In Television Again • Thin Thing