Thom York – “The Eraser” 2006

This is a CD I’ve been obsessing over for months. At first, it seemed like a bunch of Radiohead demos, a stop-gap whilst they were off the road and out of the studio. The music seemed too sparse, too much like a the best bits from a full notepad pre-editing. The lyrics were a familiar gumbo of paranoia and mirror- fracture musings, maybe a little more nakedly so than usual. On the other hand, they were good demos. The loops were off-kilter Auterchre-isms but never jarring with the (very up-front vocals) and little runs of etude-like piano kept tinkling across these potentially sterile soundscapes like solemn mice.

I kept listening.

It’s the voice that starts to pull you in, alternately a choirboy singing a requiem and the greatest tenor in the world moaning about his horrid day at the office whilst making it sound like day 327 at Guatanamo Bay. “Harrowdown Hill” hooked me first, a skittering beat and a deeply reverbed vocal, atmospheric synths fading in and out of a fearsomely paranoid (sorry, that word just won’t keep out of anything written about Yorke, will it?) run out complete with snapped bass accents and a chant of “It was a slippery slippery slippery slope/I feel me slipping in and out of consciousness”. Then the rest of the record followed in short order. “Atoms for Peace” could almost be a ballad with a positively lushly melodic line for the vocal, undercut by insect whines and lyrics like “The wriggling, squiggling worm inside/Devours from the inside out”.

The dread never stops (“So how come it looks so beautiful?/How come the moon falls from the sky?”) but the ultimately, it’s the intrinsic gift of Yorke’s voice (never more starkly recorded than this) that carries us through.

It’s on XL so there’s probably a big website somewhere.