The Smile
Wall Of Eyes
★★★★
XL RECORDINGS
UPON THEIR arrival in 2021, it was clear that The Smile weren’t just a Radiohead side-project. Their debut album, A Light For Attracting Attention, was way too good for a start, with many of the tracks (Pana-Vision, Speech Bubbles, the beautiful Free In The Knowledge) stylistically segueing from the misty moods of A Moon Shaped Pool.
Wall Of Eyes finds them moving further into their proggier side. Recorded at an undisclosed location in Oxford, and at Abbey Road, it involves a change of producer from Nigel Godrich (presumably busy overseeing the new Idles album) to Sam Petts-Davies (who worked with Yorke on his 2018 Suspiria soundtrack) but retains the inventive arranging skills of Hugh Brunt conducting the London Contemporary Orchestra.
The result sounds more live-captured – as opposed to layered – than tastefully orchestrated, and many of the tracks feature multi-movements. In what sounds like a Discipline-era King Crimson diptych, Read The Room shifts from Greenwood’s Fripp-like fractured arpeggios, over Skinner ’s simpatico loping beat, picking up pace into a double-time groove, while the six-minute-long Under Our Pillows phases from math rock to motorik to ambient.
The eight-minute Bending Hectic, meanwhile, returns to the old Yorke lyrical preoccupation (from Airbag to Killer Cars) of road crashes. Premiered during The Smile’s performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival in the summer of 2022, it utilises Greenwood’s string-bending riff to evoke the curving Italian mountain pass upon which Yorke is driving in a 1960s convertible before fatalistically “letting go of the wheel”. A massed strings glissando appears, clearly refer ring to A Day In The Life, before Yorke and Greenwood thunder into their epic rockiest moment since The Bends, as the singer attempts to reverse gravity and regain control.
As ever, Yorke’s lyrics are impressionistic and elliptical. The paranoid bossa nova of the title track appears to refer to both surveillance and projected public image (“Is that still you with the hollow eyes?”). Friend Of A Friend, a piano rooted cousin of Radiohead’s The Daily Mail, albeit jazzier and more vaguely Beatles-esque, sounds like it might concern cronyism (“All of that money…where did it go?”) and even fame and the weight of expectation (“I guess I’ll stay/At least ’til the disappointed have eaten themselves away ”).
All in all, less immediate and traditionally melodic than A Light…, Wall Of Eyes is one for the heads, revealing its many charms and details only upon repeated listens. At eight tracks, it feels a tad slighter than its predecessor, but similarly shouldn’t be mistaken for an extracurricular indulgence. Let us not forget that it’s been eight years – the entire recording life span of The Beatles – since A Moon Shaped Pool. Until Radiohead return, or even if they never regroup, The Smile will do just nicely.
XL RECORDINGS
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