Like so many of us, Thom Yorke spent the Covid lockdowns bored off his tits. Did he cram those endless drab hours with sad sourdough starters and cheesy family quizzes? Perhaps. But, happily, he also made some tunes.
Mark Pritchard is a name you may or may not be familiar with – he’s been a heavy-hitter on the dance production scene since the 90s. Back in 2011 he remixed Bloom, from Radiohead’s tragically under-appreciated ugly duckling The King Of Limbs. The pair kept in touch and during the pandemic bounced some ideas back and forth online. The result? This bonkers, beautiful LP.
Why does Tall Tales work so well? For one thing, it’s a nice novelty to hear Thom liberated from any obligation to pick up a guitar. Like, at all. Pritchard’s fluency with cool kit – retro oscillators, old-timey sci-fi keyboards, fantastical wub-wub boxes – makes a deliciously otherworldly canvas for Thom’s extraordinary voice to slosh all over in vivid, exciting ways.
It’s not sterile, in the manner perhaps certain Thom Yorke-flavoured electronica can be. It has a breathing, vital… almost jam-band quality to it. Especially towards the close of track one, an absolutely doozy called ‘A Fake in a Faker’s World.’
What’s it all about? As I dissect to my review copy of the record it’s mid-April 2025, and Donald Trump is playing seven-dimensional tariff Kerplunk with the global economy. I guess he’s the faker? But who’s to say. Thom’s lyrics have always had that intentionally oblique, Rorschach-test vibe. Decoding his couplets will forever be a mug’s game.
His voice though, by eck. On ‘Ice Shelf ‘ you really get a sense of what a formidable instrument it still is. Even channelled through Pritchard’s myriad sorcery, there’s a profound sense of vitality, of being alive, of spooky spectral respiration. Even moreso on ‘The White Cliffs,’ a kind of sad, acid-blasted post apocalyptic ‘Annie’s Song’. A chilling nihilistic waltz.
But there’s also fun and games aplenty. ‘Happy Days’ rattles along like a demented clown car, a drumbeat straight out of a kids toy. ‘Gangsters’ starts off all blips and bloops like a 16-bit beat ’em up, but ends with an uncannily dainty synth figure that calls to mind fairies dancing on the head of a stylus.
Is Thom happy? On ‘Back In The Game‘, he dryly informs us “it’s either this or jump / if you know what I mean”. ‘The Spirit’ sounds to me like a battle with the bottle. ‘Tall Tales’, the title track, is perhaps ‘Revolution 9’ for the Trump era, evoking – again, for me, possibly I’m full of it, who knows – both the mad king himself and the strange, curtain-twitchingly weird world he’s forced us to inhabit.
Death, taxes and divorce – it strikes me – are the key themes stalking this record. Oh, and there’s an accompanying film, by Jonathan Zawada, that I was lucky enough to watch last week. Uncannily pretty, peculiarly uplifting. I won’t spoil it, but the best bit is an army of robotic arms making Mark Rothkos in a sunny plein air setting.
Is it a comment on AI art? Well, duh. But by the end, you’re not really sure what’s AI and what isn’t. The question being, surely, will we ever know, from here on in? How are we supposed to feel about this? Does it even matter?
For now, thank your lucky stars you’re alive at the same time as Thom Yorke, still cranking out the goods – straddling sound worlds that are somehow both strangely synthetic, and extraordinarily, achingly human.
Tall Tales is released on May 9th through Warp Records.
