Last week I made the mistake of offering to write a review of the upcoming (now-released) record from Radiohead offshoot band The Smile. I was doing it for PopMatters, who doesn’t pay for their pieces. I scrapped this original draft but thought it might be worth posting here - not because I’m proud of it, but because the sentiment is honest.
Wall of Eyes by The Smile gets an 8 out of 10. Now you don’t have to scroll down, you can just move on and we have your click. Win, win.
Or, if you need a little more, here you go:
“The Smile’s Wall of Eyes, unlike their debut LP A Light for Attracting Attention, is less a collection of songs than a cohesive statement. The songs are lengthy, the pace is unhurried, and the music is as typically gorgeous as the band’s members are known for delivering. From the get-go, vocalist Thom Yorke zeroes in on post-pandemic social dynamics on the thrumming title track, where he addresses the dehumanizing effect of technology as eloquently as he ever has. Tom Skinner’s drumming is remarkably textured, an ideal counterpart to the compositional restraint of these songs. Notice how his muted toms on “I Quit” highlights the percussive guitar samples and pensive piano pattern, or how his snare rolls flesh out the circus-like atmosphere of ‘Read The Room.’”
Can you wring joy out of these words? Come on, let’s be real. You don’t need this, I don’t need this, and The Smile doesn’t need this. Wall of Eyes was delivered to my email by the band’s label without a PR statement providing any context, just a list of credits and some lyrics. They know the reviews are written before we put our fingers to the keys. The Smile doesn’t give interviews. They know how pointless it is. Deep down they understand they don’t have anything more to say about their art except “We’re doing it for fun” or “I’m just stringing lyrics together,” as they admitted during one of their their only interfacings with the public, at a surprise appearance at a London screening of their record. Who among us would deign to plunge these depths further? We have built ourselves into the type of people who demanded to be cultural authorities and our word means nothing anymore. It’s not completely our fault; ours is an art breathing its dying breaths because to insist on a thoughtful way to look at things from the inside out insinuates that there are revelatory alternatives to the name brands, furnaces that all the money gets poured into. We didn’t survive the commodification of the Internet because we chose to support the winners, and the winners didn’t need our support. We wrote ourselves out of existence.
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