On The Eraser

Radiohead, "Fog" - Goddammit, I was totally ready to be artfully snooty about Thom Yorke's much-ballyhooed solo debut The Eraser, and then it had to go and be one of the best album's I've heard this year. I hasten to add that good as it is, it's nowhere near being in the mix with the best 2006 has to offer so far (that would be Silent Shout, Through the Window Pane, and So This Is Goodbye for those of you keeping score at home), but considering that we're talking about an album that had me sharpening my "Oh goody, Jeff Lynne made a solo album" claws, that's hardly a criticism. Surprisingly, I'm increasingly catching myself breaking with all those reviews that try to sell the album as a headphone masterpiece - not that it's not, mind you (textures in places where other albums oh you know the drill etc), but I've gotten way more mileage out of it as a car album, of all things. I mean*, I don't know how you like to listen to music when you drive, but I've noticed that I find myself attaching a premium to albums that don't lead me to skip from track to track; maybe it's a side-effect of living in Los Angeles where even a trip to the Pavillions up the street requires you to budget thirty minutes of drive-time, but I can definitely testify to the value an unbroken soundtrack can add to an extended session of staring at the road. In that regard, I was pretty much just waiting for The Eraser to notice me in the crowd and get all up in my grill; I hate to compare anything to arguably the single greatest piece of music I've ever heard, but I haven't found a listening experience as contiguous as The Eraser since I woke the fuck up to Music for 18 Musicians within scandalously recent months. If "Harrowdown Hill" weren't so clearly head and shoulders above everything else on the record, I'd be calling bullshit on anyone with a favorite Eraser song; you might as well be trying to pick your favorite bit from Playtime.

But really, that's not even the bit about The Eraser that surprised me; Yorke's been sufficiently all about some Steve Reich and John Adams and such for long enough and with enough sinciere vigor that even my avoidant ass knows about it, although I doubt anyone could have expected him to pull it off this well. No, the shocking thing about this record is simply how easy it is to listen to - I haven't been less challenged by a Radiohead-related record since The Bends, and I completely mean that as a compliment. A lot of Radiohead's formal innovations since The Bends, after all, demand a pretty astonishing amount of subservience to The Radiohead Mystique, by which I mean that little voice Nigel Goodrich buries deep in the mix of every one of their albums subliminally convincing end-users that Yorke and Greenwood's latest symphony of whale farts, classical instruments, and every trick in the Warp Records book (well, up until the moment Jamie Lidell decided to erase every letter of it and make something fun for the chi'ren, anyway) is actually a testament to the Unique and Exquisite Demons that Plague the Existence of Only the Truest Radiohead Fans, Of Which Your Membership Card Is Undoubtedly Numbered "One". I know it's a shitty thing to hate on a band out of contempt for their fanbase (doubly so when you went to film school and actively supported both Paul Thomas Anderson and Kevin Smith before experiencing a moment of clarity), but I just can't seem to help it - after all, I always thought most of the quality of Radiohead's music came from the fact that it shouldn't exist, what with Yorke's ugly voice and rock being dead and America being under attack and so on...and yet it exists anyway, so we might as well see if it's deserving of digestion.

And for a while, I'd have said that it was, largely because Radiohead used to have a knack for rock pomp unseen since Queen ruled the airwaves. Not that that's any great measure of quality on its own, of course - if it were, I'd probably own substantially more My Chemical Romance CDs than I do now -but I'll be damned if Radiohead didn't have a knack for seizing on the momentum of that pomp and coming up with incredibly vivid hooks with extraordinary staying power (to this day, my head still shoots up at the first note of "Just"). And then OK Computer happened, and after realizing that they'd whipped that horse about as much as it could stand to be whipped, Kid A, the exact opposite, happened, and none of this is news to you so let's just leave it at that. Suffice it to say, all of a sudden their hooks became less about "being compelling" and more about "taking really unorthodox roads to 'compelling'", and if you're (quite reasonably) shocked at the fact that I didn't warm to that like a pot warms to a stove, that might have something to do with the fact that most of those roads were unorthodox for a reason. It says a lot about Kid A that the only parts of that record that I can actually say I experienced were the warmth of the opening tones and Yorke mewling "Ice age coming/Is this really happening?"; one hates to be a rock reactionary, but at the end of the day, it's hard to find a reason to stand up for an album that doesn't even give me as many entry points as Pablo Honey's "Vegetable". And while they'd occasionally fuck up and make something staggeringly beautiful - q.v. "Fog", a b-side to some single which may well be my favorite Radiohead track ever - that didn't seem to be what Radiohead was about anymore; they felt like one-offs, inconsequential shots fired outside the canon. What appeal, then, could an album by the frontman of a band like that possibly hold?

Well, if someone had TOLD me that Yorke was planning on remaking "Fog" nine times in one album (well, okay, "Fog" and "Backdrifts"), I might have thought differently. Like "Fog", the main point of The Eraser seems to be about marking the boundaries of the songs' sonic space; several songs feel "spare", but none of them ever feel "empty" the way a lot of tracks on Kid A or Hail to the Thief do to me - comparing either of those two albums to The Eraser feels like comparing barking to fluttering. After all, if there's one thing all those headphone tours of The Eraser have to show for themselves, it's that it's a profoundly hooky album; there's all kinds of crazy shit to grab your attention on every track, although the fact that it's not bashing you in the face like the guitar riff from "Optimistic" might lead a careless listener to believe otherwise. And while I'm not ordinarily one to rag on careless listening (ask me about what I thought of the Knife until the first second I started listening to Silent Shout sometime), I'd dare say that it's worth a closer examination if you're on the fence about it; the fact that it's impossible to describe as anything other than a minor work next to the graduate-level theses of Radiohead's recent output (future too, assuming that original mix of "Arpeggi" holds any hints for future events) really shouldn't deter you from confronting very probably the prettiest thing Yorke can claim responsibility for since that epic wail at the end of "The Tourist".

Not that anybody reading an MP3 blog in this day and age needs any sort of prompting on that point, of course; I think it's safe to say that The Eraser's market saturation had been reached even before it sold enough to get to #2 on the charts. In the end, its comparatively tiny stature is probably going to doom it to revisionism to the point of irrelevance; I guarantee you that if online music dorxxx can get themselves worked into a frenzy over the merits of an album as ultimately inconsequential (albeit pretty damn fun in the meantime) as Lily Allen's, there's not a future The Eraser could possibly have that doesn't involve getting swallowed up by the debate. Which is a shame; the remarkable thing about this album, after all, is that it exists in the first place. No wonder I like it so much. (Click here to buy The Eraser from Amazon.com)

Lonely China Day, "Beijing Realist" - I suppose that people on this earth exist who can walk through their local indie-rock megastore without finding themselves taunted by phrases on the employee description cards like "Indie rock from China!"; all I can hope is that some of those people read this blog, because I'm about as prone to being a victim of that kind of soft sell as I would be to the Hanta virus. I'm willing to fess up to a certain perverse fascination with exoticism, mostly because I freely admit that it usually ends up with me being bitten in the ass and wallet courtesy of a thousand lovingly-compiled collections which earn precisely one tour through my CD player (go on, ask me about my aborted Afrobeat phases). But sometimes, that "Hey, I wonder what those people what ain't like me ev'n a lil' bit" voice leads me down the road to truth, most recently in the form of the debut EP from Lonely China Day, an indie-rock outfit from China which pretty much shames most indie-rock I've been hearing from anywhere lately. It's really high-quality stuff, built from the ground up on the tensile strength of these epic - though not sweeping - arrangements, like someone booked Slowdive to perform for an opera crowd or something. There is also the not-insignificant matter of lead singer Deng Pei's vocals, although I'm thinking I'm just going to walk away from that particular anvil and let it fall on you in its own due course. Does it excuse all those tedious blindly-bought Femi Kuti records (and yes, now I know to go to his dad for answers to Afrobeat matters)? Hell no. But it's a start. (Click here to buy the self-titled Lonely China Day EP direct from the label, Tag Team Records)

Midlake, "Bandits" - I'm beginning to arrive at the unavoidable conclusion that Midlake's The Trials of Van Occupanther really is one of the best albums I've heard this year; aside from the fact that the album just flat-out seems to have staying power (I've been listening to "Roscoe" since I worked at that wine-holding company in February), there's the phenomenon of my seeming inability to go more than three plays into the album before I discover I have a new favorite song on it. I'll admit that right now "Bandits" isn't that song - that title would belong to "Head Home", coincidentally posted yesterday at the always-top-shelf Badminton Stamps - but it was for a good solid minute, and I still like the hell out of it anyway. I just like the way it moves - the song practically undulates on that piano line, and when it comes crashing against all those multi-tracked harmonies it's among the most compelling moments in any song I've heard this year, and the fact that I could find something equally simple to fall into on nearly every track on the album tells me that I'm dealing with a special little album here. It's just an extraordinarily studied album, packed tight with reverence for its own beauty, and even if there are smarter or more accomplished or even more fun albums out there, that's a mighty hard siren song to resist. Now they just need to swing by LA on their next tour. Stupid Austin and the stupid Northeastern states not being located within a thirty-minute drive. SO MUCH HATE. (Click here to buy The Trials of Van Occupanther directly from Bella Union, the label)

*YEAH FUCKERS