Thom Yorke - The Eraser

First of all, let's clarify something - Thom Yorke's The Eraser is a solo album. Yorke himself would like you to think otherwise: "I don't wanna hear that word solo. Doesn't sound right." But it's a record made by one guy who usually makes records with a larger group. It's a solo record.

Ok, nitpicking over. On to the music.

The Eraser is either a) a documentation of Thom Yorke in a bit of a slump or b) proof that Radiohead's brilliance is much bigger than Thom Yorke alone. I'm inclined to take b), since Yorke's name hasn't been on a subpar release since way back in 1993 (that'd be Radiohead's debut, Pablo Honey). At any rate, The Eraser is fairly uninteresting, one or two tracks aside, and not a particularly good addition to the Radiohead canon.

All of the nine songs are more or less interchangeable: electronic beats from the Autechre-for-Dummies book (Autechre's manager might want to check that beat from "The Clock" against Autechre's Tri Repetae++; there might be some royalties due), darkly ominous synths (and the occasional piano) from the Brian-Eno-for-Dummies book, and generic paranoid Radioheadisms like "There's no spark/No light in the dark," or "Time is running out for us," or "You will be dispensed with when you become inconvenient."

The most obvious reference point here is Radiohead's Kid A, but The Eraser lacks everything that made Kid A such a revelation: its genius wasn't about the newfound electronic backdrops, it was the sense of paranoia and isolation that permeated every note. It was about the meticulous production and performances that were mechanical and icy to the point of numbness, but always seemed to be on the verge of a complete breakdown. You can't phone that stuff in. Just as bands like Muse, Keane, and Kent have shown how easy it was to get everything entirely wrong with Radiohead's "rock" days of The Bends and Ok Computer, The Eraser shows how fine a line there is between Kid A-like brilliance and derivative mediocrity. I just never thought that the first person to corrupt Kid A's visionary foray into electronic pop would be Thom Yorke.