by shannon palmer

A Week With Thom Yorke's "The Eraser": Day 1

25 July 2006
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Hannah Clemens//Illustration by Shannon Palmer
It’s hard not to suspect that Thom Yorke might be having a good laugh at our expense. After all, throughout the short period of recording “The Eraser” last year, he offered no hint of the project’s existence, not a peep to tease us until the middle of May. Then and only then did W.A.S.T.E. members, who thought they were waiting for a new Radiohead album, receive a cryptic e-mail with a link to an even more cryptic website. Then the whole thing leaked in June – was it an ingeniously subversive marketing ploy of his own devising, or an honest bugger-up on the label’s behalf? The world may never know. Now that “The Eraser” is officially available, anyone with fortitude enough to wait until the release date is liable to be astonished anew. There are no yearning acoustic tracks here, no shades of the Thom we may
remember from “Gagging Order” or “Good Morning Mr. Magpie.” And even though “Cymbal Rush” made its live debut at an acoustic performance, Yorke’s programming makes it sound like what a frog must hear as the water around it starts to boil. Neither does “The Eraser” bear much beyond a superficial resemblance to the blippy, electronic soundscapes of “Kid A” and “Amnesiac.” Yorke has, however, taken the muted beats that first appeared on some of “Hail to the Thief” and perfected them to create tracks both woozy and occasionally quite danceable. Unfortunately the same distant rhythm is apt to get this album labeled cold or grey, at least at first listen. Yes, it’s cynical and depressing. But there is much more to absorb here, and it takes more than one time through to catch it all. Those who give up after spinning “The Eraser” once are not the listeners Thom wants
anyway – it’s as self-fulfilling a prophecy as the one he describes in “Analyze.”

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