THE SMILE
Cutouts (XL)
BODIES TWISTING IN FREE DANCE, percussive feet and loose shoulders in repetition, Reich in miniature, “good intentions” paving the road, but the eyes are set up to the middle distance so it doesn’t matter, or does it, “you’re not so tough”, chillwave and post-new wave. It’s happening.
Oh hello, they’re back. Already?
Two albums from Jonny Greenwood, Tom Skinner and Thom Yorke – the busman’s holidaying trio of The Smile – in nine months (their third in not much more than two years)? Cutouts the sequel-that-is-more-sister of this year’s Wall Of Eyes? A rush of material that once could have been disc two of a double or triple album, or thought of as extras, but which turn out to be far from leftovers, songs at least as strong as those already released and making a sustained argument across the accumulated 18 tracks?
If that sounds familiar, Greenwood and Yorke’s other band, Radiohead, did it a couple of decades ago with Kid A and Amnesiac, broadening an experience without overloading, subtly differentiating while retaining a strong cohesion. And The Smile do it just as effectively.
Not a jazz group but prepared to play with the idea of improvisation as a concurrent lane, not a rock group but capable of rhythm and power with the continued capacity of the guitar, not an electronic studio project but often built with as much theoretical as mechanical, The Smile don’t so much hover at the edges of these genres as sucking them up like some alien tractor beam. Cutouts reconstitutes what the beam pulled in.
The wiry guitar, that runs hither and thither, sometimes spooling up and threatening to blow through the studio ceiling in Zero Sum, is quite thrilling in its free reign and free range. Then it comes to a face-to-face meeting with saxophone in semi-skronk mode and the power charge bouncing off this chemical encounter could take the rest of ceiling away altogether.
In similar athletic mode, the Arabic tones of Colours Fly and Skinner’s momentum-and-sidestepping drums feel like a charge downfield after a Nathan Cleary kick: the receiver is wavering, the oncoming rush is wide and all encompassing, and even after the bodies clash and a pause seems likely, it is only temporary.
Eyes & Mouth has another of those mesmerising guitar lines, this time coming in circular waves (none ever really crashing, just carried further by the next, wrapping the centre in layers) with bass hypnotically rhythmic and drums running alongside and ahead then alongside and beneath. It’s kinetic, but the piano grounds it too, Yorke’s elliptical lyrics leaving open possibilities, but the positioning of his voice, just off-centre with the rising tide of the backing voices, creates a closed space.
The Slip is familiar Yorke/Greenwood territory in particular, a ragged rhythm overlay on a solid-air base cuts in and out, probing into the open skin flow snatches of guitar (angular, rolling, piercing, dancing), bottom-end keyboards and spindly percussion. Meanwhile, Bodies Laughing is a classic Yorke-ian blend of the utterly pretty (the voice, the guitar, the low-toned backing voices) and the intimations of something wrong, a disturbance in the heron house if you will (the synth sounds, the creeping escalation, the low-toned backing voices).
These might be expected but Cutouts doesn’t just play in the busy room. Foreign Spies opens the album with a bed of ancient synth sounds and Yorke’s voice emerging from the swamp, the combination reminiscent of the second side of Bowie’s Low, though The Smile are – and this may surprise some people who consistently miss this in this band and its predecessor – more tender, less alienated than the famously chilly moments, Bowie and Tony Visconti conjured then and revisited with Black Star.
On its heels, Instant Psalm is similarly tender, acoustic guitar and almost physically graspable strings now to the fore and Yorke caressing in a hymnal delivery even as the shadow passes over. “We can slide through the narrow gap/The narrow gap that you leave us in/And we feel you near/But so close that you disappear.”
Later, when Don’t Get Me Started brings some of these early sounds back, the chill factor is more noticeable, the mood lower like the tempo, but its companion track, Tiptoe, takes that chill and moulds it into a cool distancing that doesn’t push away, just lets the space grow around the strings that bend and sway.
As with Wall Of Eyes, and indeed with Black Star – an album and artist which could be a philosophical, intellectual and emotional template for The Smile – this is a record that refuses to catalogue neatly but the patterns really are laid out before you. They are connected. Everything is connected. Including us.
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What a lovely review