The Smile – Cutouts – Album Review
by Killian Laher

Some Radiohead fans will be cursing the existence of the second album this year, and third album overall from Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s other band, The Smile.  Again it’s not too far divorced from the sound of their original band.  The opening track Foreign Spies, however, starts out with retro-sounding keyboards, more Kid 80s than Kid A.  An odd choice as an opener, but very good nonetheless.  After this, it’s something of a mixed bag.  Well, you get the (not very) Instant Psalm, another slow song with some almost soothing strings.  There are some particularly knotty tracks here, Zero Sum, Eyes and Mouth, and The Slip are all kind of obtuse sounding, like the band deliberately avoided taking any easy options.  Later, the busy-sounding No Words will appeal to fans of more recent Radiohead, Yorke singing doomily about how “the road is paved with good intentions”, but the track just stops abruptly after four minutes.

Elsewhere?  Colours Fly is a slow and brooding latter day Thom Yorke ‘floater’, while Don’t Get Me Started is difficult in a good way, some seemingly random keyboard progressions coming together to make a decent track.  Tiptoe is a departure, a string-dominated piano ballad.  It sounds timeless, almost like a torch song, yet it’s far from old-fashioned.  The album finishes on a downbeat note with Bodies Laughing, which starts as a sparse strum with swirling keyboards, building well to be one of the better tracks here.

The overall effect is somewhat less than the sum of the parts.  There is no real epic track here, unlike the previous album Wall of Eyes.  It’s an amorphous, slippery beast of an album, hard to get to know, and not too difficult to forget.

Foreign Spies