The Smile - A Light For Attracting Attention Review
As Yorke has said, this is not a reassuring smile but the kind that lies to you every day.
The Smile was born out of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood’s desire to make music over the lockdown, and they appeared on the scene playing Glastonbury’s Live at Worthy Farm with Son’s of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner. Their first album, A Light for Attracting Attention, produced by long-time Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, is not an album that shies away from the fuckery of recent times but jumps right into the doom pool to find the cracks where the light can seep in.
As Yorke has said, this is not a reassuring smile but the kind that lies to you every day; that sinister smile plastered over Putin’s puffed-up plastic face comes to mind, and the album doesn’t leave any ambiguity with the nature of the band’s name, the album leering into being with the first song “The Same.” Ominous pulsating synths beat like a life support machine as a melody appears from behind the darkness, Yorke singing, “we don’t need to fight, look towards the light.” He continues, revealing the ire of his dirge, “somebody's telling lies, simple ass motherfuckers, one mistake after another.” Who could he possibly be talking about? The song builds to the pleading chorus to the strains of Greenwood’s guitar, Yorke begging, “people in the streets please, we all want the same please, we are all the same.” It’s as if Bob Marley’s and John Lennon’s bumper-sticker optimism has been put through the blender of the last twenty years, the plea is the same, but it’s hard to find any saccharine hope in The Smile’s iteration of it. From there, the album launches into “The Opposite,” Skinner’s drums kicking in with a beat that pulls out a menacing riff from Greenwood’s guitar and summons Yorke’s twenty-first-century shaman to existence. Yorke incanting things like, “what will now become of us?” “Can we have a next contestant, please?” Culminating in the chorus directed at our old friend from the first song, ‘He doesn’t mean anything, anything at all,’ amen. “You Will Never Work In Television Again”, a song railing against the Weinstein soaked culture, culminates this attack on the lizard faced patriarchy, the weapon - distorted guitars, Bonham-Esque drums and the rawest Yorke has been in years. When he sings, ‘take your dirty hands of my love,’ I can’t help but feel this is personal.
Not ones to just point the finger, the tone of the album shifts with “Pana-vision” to a more introspective mood and Greenwood’s movie composer alter ego comes searing through. This song could be a theme for a Bond movie in an alternate universe and sums up this album’s musical ride. We have the sneering-noisy catharsis of these first few songs. We also have moments of transcendental bliss that only this grouping of musicians could produce, from the dark funk of “The Smoke,” where Yorke’s bass line guides a ghostly seventies horn section to shadow box with his sultry falsetto, to the sublime “Speech Bubbles” that will not disappoint fans of In Rainbows.
In “Open the Floodgates”, Yorke sums up the thirty-year-old predicament he has found himself in, that of hit-making tunesmith for a generation who shout, “Someone lead me out the darkness.” He doesn’t mince his words, portraying us as addicts begging Yorke for our musical fix, “Don't bore us get to the chorus, and open the floodgates,” he sings. Not accidentally, the next song, “Free in the Knowledge”, is that fix. And of all things, it is an acoustic ballad that morphs into what could be a lush pean to Micahel Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror.” Maybe hell has frozen over.
The album continues much in the same vein veering between the scathing and the sublime, ending with “Skirting on The Surface,” a song that wraps it all up in a zen-like meditation on the transience of life; the Yorke falsetto, Greenwood guitars and a rhythm section that wouldn’t have been out of place on Bowie’s Blackstar, hinting at the possibility of light behind all this gloom.