Mark Pritchard And Thom Yorke
Tall Tales
★★★★
WARP
When Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard released the first track from their collaborative album Tall Tales in February, they thoughtfully included a free nightmare with every stream. Directed by the Australian artist, filmmaker and “third member” of the project, Jonathan Zawada, the video for Back In The Game featured a parade of hideous creatures – a weird fish with another fish in its mouth, a Lord Of The Flies-style pig, a tentacled mini-Cthulhu – marching to a museum to participate in a bonfire of art. Rendered in the squashy dayglo of kids’ TV, it became a queasy – if somewhat blunt – illustration of a world fallen to grotesque forces.
-
READ MORE: Thom Yorke’s Tour Diary: “All I want to do is run around waving my hands up and down like Björk.”
From the moment he cast himself as the eternal weirdo of Creep – the Frankensteined outsider who just wants to be loved – Yorke has been no stranger to monsters, inside and out. Together with his long-time artistic collaborator Stanley Donwood, he has created a whole cast of cryptids: the genetically modified bear logo that emerged at the same time as Radiohead’s 2000 game-changer Kid A; the weeping minotaur that appeared on the artwork of follow-up Amnesiac; the sad-eyed mutants of the woodlands that decorated 2011’s The King Of Limbs. In 2001, Yorke admitted he was fascinated by monsters, by the way humans unleash them “only to awaken one morning to the terrible truth that there is nothing at all you can do to stop them.” Tall Tales feels as if it’s playing out in the aftermath of that realisation. From the brutal sweep of A Fake In A Faker’s World, the sound of Kraftwerk’s Robots taking over the asylum, these songs exist in the moment where the monsters – of whatever kind – appear to have won.
That might be why Yorke grimly mutters “back to 2020 again” over the ominous electro-capering of Back In The Game, a reminder of this album’s long-distance lockdown genesis. The singer’s relationship with Pritchard goes back to The King Of Limbs, though, when the Yeovil-born, Sydney-based artist – the co-founder of ’90s dance label Evolution, one-half of Global Communication and a genre-hopping musician of a thousand names – remixed Bloom into the kind of sound that loops in your head during a bout of flu. Five years later, Yorke contributed vocals to Pritchard’s 2016 album Under The Sun, singing the grief-stricken Beautiful People, identifying a “flap of the wings/and the chaos that it brings”.
While Radiohead have been playing Schrodinger’s band since their last album, 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool, Yorke has not been short of creative outlets. The Smile, his project with Jonny Greenwood and Sons Of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner, has gathered its own momentum over three albums, while he has also released solo records – most recently 2019’s Anima – and his soundtrack work. This collaboration feels like a specific crystallisation of his enduring love of electronic music, its release on Warp fitting given how much Autechre and Aphex Twin informed Radiohead’s Kid A-era pivot.
Pritchard’s own inclinations, meanwhile, seem to chime with the Radiohead worldview. “I’ve always had a fascination for the things that can shut you down,” he said in 2016. “Music can make you happy, or sad, but some can also shut off time, shut everything off. Like everything has disappeared.” Yorke, who once complained his voice was “too pretty”, has frequently displayed a similar pull towards erasure. No wonder then, that Tall Tales can sound atomised, aerosolised, Yorke’s voice settling over A Fake In A Faker’s World in a cool mist. Throughout these songs there’s imagery of boats and ships, drowning, standing on the edge of something vast and terrifying. If you didn’t know Ice Shelf was called Ice Shelf, you could probably make a good guess, its sliding-doors take on climate change (“choose now before you’re gone”) sounding like a deep-frozen Bon Iver before thawing into a brilliant torrent of glitch, Bugging Out Again puts Yorke through the alienating whirl of a Leslie Speaker, while the disembodied prog of The White Cliffs hints at all the different ways a person might cross over, their true destination swathed in a swirl of foggy synths.
The Spirit is the closest Tall Tales comes to a “conventional” song - imagine Coldplay pushed through some of Zawada’s unnerving software – but that’s the only moment of solid ground or human touch. It’s clear that Fitter, Happier has been a core Radiohead track all along, these tracks often dissolving into inhuman chatter and cold corporate speak. the marmoreal techno of This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice hints at Severance-core trauma (“I’m not your problem to be corrected/how can you function with a mind ejected?”) while the title track is full of distorted voices, a cross between a malign séance and a social media pile-on. Happy Days is almost gauche, romping along on a martial drumbeat like a Brechtian student production as Yorke and singer Louisa Revolta (she appears to be real) chant “death and taxes!” It’s explicitly about debt (“we expect payment immediately of the full amount notwithstanding”), but then that’s implicit in every song, from the electronic hive collapse of Gangsters (“Business is now picking up/things are really looking up”) to the incoming storms of Back In The Game.
The most intriguing track, however, is The Men Who Dance In Stags’ Heads, its otherworldly glimmer only slightly dimmed by being traceable back to Benjamin Myers’ 2017 novel The Gallows Pole. It’s fuelled by harmonium, oboe, saw and bells and sounds like All Tomorrow’s Parties in Ivor Cutler’s Scotch Sitting Room, Yorke trying out a low Lou Reed-ish drawl. Its antique drone also has something of PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake about it, a shared sense of how the past can suddenly push up where the topsoil rubs away, how history is just below the surface. The present might have imploded, but there’s a return to something older here, something that’s endured against the odds. It might tell another story of deceit and death, but that it’s survived is almost hopeful.
There isn’t that much hope on Tall Tales, though. It ends with the fluting white-out drift of Wandering Genie, Yorke’s layered voice finally vanishing into beautiful abstraction, leaving whatever's left to the monsters. “Everything is out of our hands,” he sings on The White Cliffs, but when it comes to nameless dread, at least Yorke and Pritchard have a firm grasp on the situation.
Tall Tales is out May 9 on Warp.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
Tracklisting:
A Fake in a Faker’s World
Ice Shelf
Bugging Out Again
Back in the Game
The White Cliffs
The Spirit
Gangsters
This Conversation is Missing Your Voice
Tall Tales
Happy Days
The Men Who Dance in Stag’s Heads
Wandering Genie
Get the definitive verdict on all the month's essential new albums, reissues, music books and films only in the latest issue of MOJO, on sale now. More info and to order a copy HERE!
Photo: Pierre Toussaint