Thom Yorke - The Eraser Reviewed

Thom Yorke doesn’t flashdance. If you were expecting for The Eraser to “bring the funk” with its “mostly electronic” tickle-tack-snap-snare presentation, then you better leave the dancing shoes at home, and wipe the glitter from your cheeks - for there are only storm clouds ahead. There are lights, of course, but not of a dance floor phenomenon. More distracting than disco, more strobe than halogen, the lights Thom Yorke uses to “guide” his audience through The Eraser, find their basis in disorientation, paranoia, and shadows.

With that said, it’s understandable how “Black Swan” is set to play over the closing credits of Richard Linklater’s new film, A Scanner Darkly. Anyone familiar with Radiohead can recognize the fear and anxiety available in every lyric and croon of Yorke, a feeling that is effervescent in the trailer for the new Linklater film. Additionally, with Stanley Donwood’s amazing panoramas, portraying the black magic of a lone sorcerer bringing London under flood, a visual world is created of the comeuppance of a civilization that has become too advanced for its britches.

What Yorke has done here (as he has done before) is create a warning, a siren, a “bat signal” for the problems of the future, the times in which we are living in right now. If this message seems similar to what has been portrayed on other Radiohead releases (most notably OK Computer and Kid A), it’s because it is. However, the difference here is that Yorke has been able to effectively proclaim this message in the most minimal of circumstances, and as solitary as it can come.

The Eraser contains no Greenwoods, and little to no guitar. After his 15 or so years with the band that has defined this generation, Thom Yorke can finally say he has done it on his own.

Thom Yorke – “Black Swan” mp3 (dead link - sorry people)

Pre-order The Eraser at Insound or at Amazon.