I just have one question for Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. And that question is, "Seriously? This is it? This is the project that you felt was worthy of holding up the new Radiohead record for another year or so?"

Maybe that's not an entirely fair question. While it's true that it's been an incredibly long wait for new Radiohead material (2003's Hail to the Thief was the first album of theirs to release since I decided I would consider myself a fan, so I didn't have to deal with the really long wait for Kid A), Thom Yorke taking the time to do a solo album may have been caused more by the band taking their time to get their next record done, as a creative outlet for material that didn't quite fit the band in the meantime, rather than the cause-and-effect being the other way around. Still, it's been almost a year now since Thom put out his solo debut The Eraser - an idiosyncratic electronica album which he wishes I wouldn't call a "solo record" because of the connotations it carries. Dude, I know you're not leaving the band and all. But since you're the primary creative thrust behind the band, and since you've recorded songs akin to the ones presented here with the full band on their three most recent albums, I guess I'm just not sure I see the need for you to release this material apart from them, you know? I do realize that all things Radiohead-related take a bit of time and patience to fully appreciate, and that's why I managed to slog forward through repeat listens to this album despite my initial colossal disappointment with it. But I've had plenty of time to get used to it now, and it still feels a bit hasty and unfinished, like a set of sketches or outlines of Radiohead songs that got aborted somewhere during the recording process.

Now I don't say this because I'm one of those Radiohead fans who just wants to hear them rawk and can't invest the time in their creepy electronic side trips. Some of my favorite Radiohead tracks are the quirky "techno" songs such as "Idioteque", "The Gloaming", "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box", and so forth. Kid A is my #2 favorite album of theirs, behind the traditional favorite OK Computer. I'm sure much bigger Radiohead fans than myself exist (they're a band I'm incredibly curious about, but I'm not as obsessively and consistently in love with their output as some people are) who can see a lot of good in The Eraser, and perhaps it's meant to be mostly a side project for devoted fans who wanted to see what Thom would come up with apart from the creative ideas of the four other blokes in the band. My main reasons for complaining about The Eraser are threefold:

1) It's too short. 9 songs is just a lazy excuse for an album in the vast majority of cases - some progressive rock-type artists who draw out songs to ridiculous lengths with multiple, discernibly different sections can get away with this because it feels like an individual track contains several different songs (Radiohead themselves did such a thing with "Paranoid Android"). But Yorke's songs tend to stay largely the same, repeating rhythmic and lyrical ideas over the course of 4 or 5 minutes. Anything less than 10 "normal-length" songs means that your album is an EP in my book, and should be sold as such.

2) It's too repetitive. I realize that some degree of repetition is just part of the whole electronic music M.O. - you create a beat, you build off of it with different instruments or computerized sounds, and you may or may not sing something over it (in Thom's case, you do). That's fine, but most of these tracks lack much of a "build" or a "climax", and nearly every single one insists on pulling the plug abruptly at the end instead of concluding in any sort of a satisfying way.

3) It's too much like Radiohead, minus the sonic variance. Solo artists may branch away from their mother bands momentarily (or more permanently, depending on the situation) to establish a voice of their own and take the music in a different direction than what made sense for the band. I'm not convinced that any of these songs wouldn't have worked on Radiohead albums, except for the fact that some of them don't work at all.

Now having said all that, there are some definite strengths to Yorke's solo work. For one, while he may repeat a beat or melodic idea too much throughout a single song, pretty much every song starts in a way that I find interesting and engaging. That's because I enjoy the whole approach of just futzing around with clicks and thumps and samples and found sounds on a laptop, constructing a rhythm out of them, and molding them into something melodic and possibly even catchy - finding harmony in the atonality of it. Yorke's lyrics, of course, beg for multiple messed-up interpretations - I've complained about his mumbly crooning and muttering in the past, but here, while his voice is just as ominous, I find that I understand the individual words better, and they do a decent job of shading in the white spaces between the squiggly black lines created by each song's rhythm. With a few notably frustrating exceptions, the beginning of each song is actually a high point for me. It's the predictability after that initial "Hey, nice beat" reaction that drags my mood down considerably as the album wears on.

I'm not saying that the album is a total wash - in my own twisted way, I find it to be more than useful background music to put on during the work day, letting the tick-tock of many of the song's rhythms propel productivity, for fear of the ghostly specter of Thom's voice leaning in like an overbearing manager and finding that I'm not getting much done. It's also good "night music", for when you're reading or blogging or whatever at 3 A.M. and you just need to get into that mindset of being ever-so-slightly creeped out in order to set the right tone for whatever flight of emotional fancy you're off on. The music flows eerily and yet pleasantly. It's just missing the presence of someone or something else to fill in a few of the holes and place landmarks within the more repetitive sections, just so you know that you didn't already pass that same tree five times earlier in your midnight walk through the haunted woods.

The Eraser
Please excuse me, but I got to ask
Are you only being nice because you want something?
This song opens with its plunking piano in such a way as to sound like its first few seconds were clipped off - you'll get that abrupt effect a few times on this album. I do like that Yorke is using a non-electronic instrument and electronically manipulating it by looping the piano as the melodic basis for this track. The continuous, tense notes from the instrument match up to a fairly laid back (but somehow still menacing) beat and an honestly stellar vocal performance from Thom as he wigs out about people trying to erase him and fairytale Arab princesses and being questioned under duress by people who already know what answers they want to hear. As usual for Radiohead, it could be political, or it could be nutso sci-fi, or it could be both. But one thing's for sure - it's a standout track due to Thom's ghostly voice and the way that the simple piano playing transforms into a fully synthesized and even somewhat danceable melodic lead by the time the song is over.

Analyse
A self-fulfilling prophecy of endless possibility
You roll in reams across the street
In algebra, in algebra...
The beginning of this song is particularly jarring, due to how Thom's voice and the keyboards start off simultaneously, momentarily throwing you off from the otherwise simple rhythm of the song and making you feel like there was an intro bit that got cut. The echoing roll of the piano calls out down dark streets as Thom sings of a power outage that, in his mind, may as well be the apocalypse. (Which of course he finds beautiful. You gotta love a guy who finds beauty in the dark and spooky stuff of everyday life.) He's good with the word pictures in this song, getting a little redundant towards the end as he reminds us that "You're just playing a part" and "there's no time to analyse" - it's the first of many examples where a song starts off in a promisingly haunting fashion, and then runs out of new tricks to play by about its halfway point.

The Clock
Throw coins in the wishing well for us
You make believe that you are still in charge...
Oddly enough, the most lyrically minimal and redundant song on the album turns out to be one of my favorites. It's a bit more quick, busy, and fussy than the songs that preceded it, with its dirty, nervous bits of electric guitar, its rapid thumping and tapping and beat boxing to keep time (I don't know if Thom's doing the beat boxing or not, but I love the combination of an IDM-style rhythm and a human voice used as percussion), and the echoing click-clack of wooden sticks just to provide cavernous depth to the song. Thom's still stuck on some sort of doom and gloom being imminent - he's criticizing someone for acting like they have the power to help, but really just being a figurehead who does nothing of substance. ("You just move your hands around the clock" is how he puts it.) By this point one might be getting tired of Thom's wispy "Ooooh"s, but I think they're particularly effective on this catchy little track - it's more about the nervous ambience than anything that's being said, and because it starts off all busy and intense, I'm not too bothered by the fact that it doesn't build too much beyond how it begins.

Black Swan
People get crushed like biscuit crumbs
And laid down in the bed you made
You have tried your best to please everyone
But it just isn't happening...
Look dude, you can't fool me that easily. I don't know what it is about Radiohead and re-sampling bits of old songs into new ones - "Morning Bell" was recorded in two versions, "Knives Out" borrowed its guitar phrasing from "Paranoid Android", and "Like Spinning Plates" was the reversed echo of the then-unreleased "I Will". Now Thom, who I thought was doing the solo thing to distance himself a bit from the expected trappings of Radiohead's song construction techniques, is basically remixing "I Might Be Wrong" (one of the brighter spots from Amnesiac, in my opinion), with lyrics that say a little more but appeal to me a lot less. Whatever a "black swan" is, Thom insists that he is one such animal, that he's made it to the top, and, more times than I'd really care to hear, that "this is f*cked up, f*cked up". Beyond a mildly interesting synthetic breakdown in the middle of the song, this one mostly feels like re-sampled guitar bits from a better Radiohead song with more of a minimal beat and no real roadmap for how to finish what was started.

Skip Divided
Electric veins passed through me
I thought there was this big connection
I only got my name and I got this situation...
The record's most atonal, anti-melodic song appears next, which I think is its other weak spot after "Black Swan", mostly due to the deadpan nature of Thom's vocals. I like the low, menacing synths that provide the unsettling "melody" over which Thom "sings". But once that's repeated two or three times under Thom's various grumblings, it starts to get really old really fast. His words sound very "stream of consciousness", like a drunken homeless man muttering indistinct threats as you pass him by on the street, culminating in the creepy declaration, "I'm a dog, I'm a dog, I'm your lapdog". It's an interesting experiment, trying to build a song without really singing or falling back on conventional note progressions, but that doesn't mean it's a very satisfying thing to listen to.

Atoms for Peace
The wriggling, twiggling worm inside
Devours from the inside out
No more talk about the old days
It's time for something great...
This song always makes me feel like I should be playing Bubble Bobble or something. I can't help but see a bunch of soap bubbles floating in the air as the rounded, synthesized notes systematically go up and down again, like successive floors lighting up as you travel in an elevator, deciding never to get off because you're mesmerized by the simplistic display of numbers being illuminated. Another light, minimal beat bumbles about with its occasionally glitch skipping, and all of this is an interesting setup until you realize that (a) it goes nowhere, (b) it goes on for over five minutes, and (c) yes, Thom really did just sing, "Peel all of your layers off, I want to eat your artichoke heart". Gosh, even Dave Matthews isn't that creepy or embarrassing in his requests for a girl to take her clothes off. (It's probably not about that. But it's skeevy-sounding all the same.)

And It Rained All Night
The tick, tock, tick of a ticking time bomb
Fifty feet of concrete underground
One little leak becomes a lake
Says the tiny voice in my earpiece...
This is a good song to crank up if you have rather loud bass. I don't expect that you'd pick much of anything from this record to dance to in a club, since that's not really the point of the type of music Thom's making. But this would be the best candidate if you were looking for such a song. It comes whooshing in with its viscous electronic sounds, like a swarm of cyborg bees, and its nerve-wracking synthetic shimmers, while more of that "click-clack-clack" sound provided by wooden sticks meets up with a heavier bass line, providing an all-around menacing atmosphere. It's another good showcase for Thom's voice, which manages to be sweet in its near-falsetto soaring (during the song's chorus of "I can see you, but I can never reach you") and yet unsettling at the same time as he describes a torrential rainstorm that brings all of the bugs and vermin out from under the ground as the townspeople run for cover. This is the kind of schizophrenic dance that you'd put in the soundtrack to a mind-bending psychological thriller.

Harrowdown Hill
We think the same things at the same time
We just cant do anything about it
So don't ask me, ask the ministry...
One of Thom's most nefariously political statements comes in this penultimate track (yeah, it's only track 8, what a bummer), with its looping runt of a guitar lick becoming the rhythmic basis for a menacingly rubbery beat while more tense synth chords hang like haze over the sonic landscape... at this point it's all another iteration of the same ideas that have been utilized throughout the album, but the conspiracy theory lyrics help to draw a lot of attention to this song, which is more angry and frustrated under the surface than Thom is apparently willing to discuss when asked about it. Apparently it's about a doctor or ambassador or someone important who was killed in a way made to look like an accident, because he either knew too much or was audacious enough to see "the enemy" in a less hostile light. This song has a good grasp of tension, rising and falling in a well-timed way due to a few ambient passages that give the rhythm a temporary break, before it comes skittering back in with Thom's nervous repetition of phrases adding to the momentum instead of just making things redundant like they did elsewhere. And then it all abruptly cuts off, just when it sounded like it was leading to a satisfying finale.

Cymbal Rush
Try to save your house
Try to save your songs
Try to run, but it follows you up a hill...
The final song is thankfully one of the more lucid moments on the album, where Thom is able to build from an ominous beginning to a sweeping climax without doing it in predictable fashion. I've heard that some people dislike this song for its "video game" sounds - I rather enjoy it for the same reason. The beat's all bass here, lightly thudding with just a hint of crackle without the other components to make the song move just yet, but then there are these synth notes bubbling up and it's all a tightly wound coil just waiting to spring. The song morphs into something more alive as it goes, taking a brief break for nothing but the rhythm and then bleeding back in with something sounding more like real drums that begins to creep up under the digital ear candy. The piano returns here, ramping up the intensity in a similar fashion to the title track. It never gets heavy or loud, but it definitely becomes a frothy mixture, "boiling over" as the lyrics say, depicting some sort of a flood or other catastrophe, with the water level slowly rising until there's nowhere to run. One of Thom's final crooned sentiments is as follows: "You shoulda took me out while you had the chance." And I really have no idea what any of this means, but I still love it, right up to the final breakdown of synth and rhythm, where everything else drops out, leaving you waiting for... oh come on, you know better. A few seconds more and it's gonna cut out and leave you cold. There are no drawn out, epic film deaths on this record, just the lights being coldly and casually snuffed out with no prior notice.

So that's The Eraser. I love certain small details of this record, but can't bring myself to be all that fascinated with the big picture. For a 41-minute, 9 song album, I'd say there's maybe 20 minutes of interesting music here, and I'm talking fractions of many of these songs when I say that, so I can't just tell you to hit up iTunes for the 4 or 5 songs that I think comprise the record's better half or anything like that. If you're a Radiohead fan, you know you're probably curious, and you'll find some small things to love, maybe even a track or two that strikes you as brilliant, but you'd have to be one of the most obsessive of their faithful fans to love this anywhere near as much as you love the band's best work. If you're not into Radiohead, I honestly can't see why you'd bother, unless you just like glitchy IDM. (In which case, go check out Kid A.)

Anyway, enough with the quietly apocalyptic tomfoolery. How's that new album coming along, blokes?

ALBUM WORTH:
The Eraser $1.50
Analyse $.50
The Clock $1.50
Black Swan $0
Skip Divided $0
Atoms for Peace $0
And It Rained All Night $1.50
Harrowdown Hill $1
Cymbal Rush $1.50
TOTAL: $7.50

Website: http://www.theeraser.net

Recommended: No

Great Music to Play While: At Work