Some Gangster Troll Promising The Moon

The Smile “You Will Never Work In Television Again”

I love that Thom Yorke basically waited until people entirely topped asking for him to make straight-ahead rock music to get back to making straight-ahead rock music, and I also love that Jonny Greenwood, the other member of Radiohead anyone would have reasonably expected to be uninterested in making straight-ahead rock music is the one doing it with him. It’s a bit contrary in the way you’d expect them to be, but The Smile also just makes sense as a creative move. It’s not surprising to me that Thom Yorke would want to move away from the more electronic and rhythmically dense music he’s made on his own for a very long time now. It is totally logical to me that Jonny Greenwood, a guy with an aptitude to write and play just about anything would gravitate to the opportunity to focus on bass guitar, the instrument he hasn’t had much opportunity to explore since that’s his brother’s role in Radiohead. And it makes sense that they’d play this with a drummer like Tom Skinner, who plays with more blunt physicality than Radiohead’s Phil Selway.

It’s not hard to imagine “You Will Never Work In Television Again” as a Radiohead song, but to transfer it to that template would likely mean adding some extra layers of sound that would diminish the rough simplicity of the arrangement. You could make the song more dense and louder, but the point is made well enough by Yorke’s frantic guitar and Skinner’s bashed out percussion, with Greenwood lurking behind the din adding subtle contours to the music. Yorke’s vocal lags just behind the beat like he’s chasing the song down and yelling at it as it accelerates away from him. There’s some resemblance to “Bodysnatchers” from In Rainbows and the Bends era b-side “Permanent Midnight,” but for the most part this is a different kind of rock song for Yorke and Greenwood, something that’s more primitive than what they’ve previously attempted but informed by the nuance and complexity of the music they’ve made together and apart over the years.

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