Sleepless in suburbia
Thom’s third solo album; his most emotional response to late-period capitalism. By Danny Eccleston.
Thom Yorke ★★★★ Anima XL. CD/DL/LP
IT’S 19 YEARS since Radiohead released Kid A; by that reckoning, Thom Yorke has been an electronica artist of sorts for five years longer than he was primarily a rock singer. And there are still those hoping he’ll snap out of it – shut down the laptop and get back to the proper business of widescreen arena rock.
But the sense that Yorke has found his medium is hard to shake. Anima is his third solo album, outside of soundtracks, and it’s his richest: a drill-down into strata upon strata of sound and texture, lots of detail on a small canvas full of niggling little riffs and wisps of melody carried by the quiet keen which is his current vocal mode (when not muttering to himself, Tourettishly). He’s unlikely ever to sound comfortable – his beef with the world is too great – but recently he’s sounded less and less like a man smashing himself on the edges of his own creations, tearing himself apart.
Three tracks on Anima – Not The News, Traffic and Dawn Chorus – accompany a 15-minute Netflix movie by There Will Be Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson. Yorke stars as one of a bleary army of commuters caught in a choreographed dramatisation of their lack of agency: Busby Berkeley puppets of late capitalism. Anima’s songs are similarly shot through with intimations of exploitation and ennui. “Show me the money,” intones Yorke, with a metallic sneer, in Traffic. “Party with a rich zombie.” Then, in the queasily lurching, almost parodically titled Last I Heard (…He Was Circling The Drain), he meets “humans the size of rats”. But that’s not all that’s going on. Twist addresses someone with the power to reach inside the song’s narrator and find something other than fear and loathing: “You who holds the fireflies”. And at the four-minute mark a sweep of synths joins a plangent piano, building to a climactic rush that dissolves into synthesised playground hubbub. With words and sound, it’s as intriguing a narrative as anything conjured by Paul Thomas Anderson. Yorke’s electronica has these poetic spaces (Dawn Chorus is more beautiful still, a spoken word piece that conveys a gentler disquiet, sleepless in suburbia) and sometimes it comes on like actual dance music, with a bass wobble that feels like a proprietary Yorke-ism. The emotional range of this superficially impassive music, and its catholic, no-rules palette, beguiles and surprises (Impossible Knots’ bass guitar offers a parlour version of jungle; Runwayaway has a glorious fugue of John Martyn-y guitars). Nineteen years ago, Autechre and Boards Of Canada were the benchmarks for Yorke; now, its seems, their very raison d’être was to help him get to here.
“Goddamned machinery, why don’t you speak to me?” he croons, wearily, in The Axe. “I thought we had a deal.” Electronica agnostics will recognise the feeling, but Yorke will continue on this path. He’s turned himself on; why should he turn himself off?