Eraser head

The world is a crushingly ghastly place. And life is but a cocktail of malfunction, melancholy and despair. That is, if we are to believe Thom Yorke, the lead singer and lyricist of a chirpy, cheerful British band called Radiohead.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. This was my first (and probably the only) Thom Yorke moment. It was August 2003 in Tokyo, Japan, and EMI Philippines had invited me to cover the Summer Sonic Music Festival featuring bands like Blur, The Doors (with The Cult’s Ian Astbury replacing Jim Morrison), The Strokes, Blondie, Devo, Interpol, Mars Volta, Polyphonic Spree, Stereophonics, and Radiohead, which was then promoting its fifth studio album "Hail to the Thief." I interviewed Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood and bassist Colin Greenwood in a room at the Okura Hotel in downtown Tokyo. Easygoing Jonny and wisecracking Colin discussed everything from recording their follow-up to the darkly electronic "Amnesiac," to being inspired by Miles Davis’ "Bitches Brew" when they recorded the transcendental, soul-mining "OK Computer."

The chat with Jonny and Collin was a blast although I was secretly disappointed I didn’t get the chance to talk to Thom Yorke. But while waiting at the lobby of the hotel after the interview, a short, blondish man in black with lopsided eyes and pale skin strolled in. It was Thom.

I approached Thom while he was chatting with Japanese students who made him sign their textbooks. I asked him to autograph a There There vinyl single I was holding. He scrawled his John Hancock on the back cover and pointed to one of the bonus tracks – Paperbag Writer.

"That is my favorite," Thom softly mumbled.

"O-oh…" I stammered, thinking of the song’s cryptic lyrics ("Blow into this paperbag/Go home, stop grinning at everyone").

I gathered enough courage to let out an opinion. "I like A Wolf at the Door (from "Hail to the Thief"). What’s the story behind that track?"

Thom tilted his head. "I was going crazy and I was driving around the city, when those words came to me," he said.

"How did you write Fake Plastic Trees?" I asked, amazed that the singer pictured as a sour and dour chap in the New Musical Express could be so disarming.

"Uh, I don’t remember," Thom confessed. "It’s been sooo long."

I asked, "Do you feel so detached from old compositions that whenever you perform them it feels as if you’re doing covers?"

"Yeah," Yorke nodded, wondering where he read or heard that question before. "It feels as if I’m doing covers of other people’s tunes."

"That’s cool," Thom said, examining my hand-painted shirt – with an image of a disturbing, distorted figure inside the head of another disturbing, distorted figure. "You should wash it with cold water. My friend, who’s also an artist, gave me a hand-painted shirt before. I washed it with hot water and the design got ruined."

I made a mental note of Thom Yorke’s laundry tip. It was hard to associate that very nice person with the pop philosopher who gave the world aphorisms like "There is always a siren singing you to shipwreck," or "A beautiful girl can turn your world into dust," or "Just because you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there," or "This machine will not communicate these thoughts and the strain I am under," or "Letdown and hanging around, crushed like a bug on the ground," and other lines you could sing while tangoing into the gloom.

It was like meeting Friedrich Nietzsche and finding out his hobby is cross-stitching and attending Jesus Miracle Crusade powwows.

Skip Divided

Three years later, Radiohead fans are waiting with bated breath for the follow-up to "Hail to the Thief," which has been derailed for a variety of reasons: 1) the band’s contract with EMI has already expired, 2) the sessions with Oasis/U2 producer Mark Stent weren’t at all fruitful (since the rest of the band has elected not to work on the new album with longtime producer Nigel Godrich), and 3) according to an e-mail posted by Yorke on the Radiohead website, the sessions were so slow that they drove everyone "loopy." The singer said that he was "furiously writing, working out parts, cracking up." Ah, that difficult sixth album.

Those apocalyptic sessions could probably yield an apocalyptic new record. But fans will probably have to wait until 2007 for a new Radiohead disc (which, according to the cyberspace grapevine, could boast potential classics like Bodysnatchers, Nude, and House of Cards, among others).

In the meantime, we have this: Thom Yorke’s solo album titled "The Eraser."

A solo album, eh? Could the manipulative Fates be at work here? Solo recordings by lead singers of high-profile bands tend to be either enchanting or excruciating. Soloists could end up with something as brilliant and evocative as Morrissey’s tracks off "Viva Hate" and "Vauxhall and I," or any of the classic albums recorded by Van Morrison after leaving Them, such as "Astral Weeks" and "Moondance." Or then again, they could end up with something as lackluster as any Mick Jagger song without the Stones. Keith Richards even dismissed one of Mick’s recent compositions as Dogshit on the Doorway.

Solo albums can also be half-assed things. Chris Cornell’s "Euphoria Morning" boasts the poignant Preaching the End of the World side by side with ponderous acoustic dirges. But then again, some guys shouldn’t even bother. Like Bono or Robert Smith.

Another thing. Legendary rock journalist Nick Kent wrote in his Thom Yorke article in the August issue of MOJO magazine that "solo albums are (usually) harbingers of a (band) split." A case in point is Paul McCartney’s debut album heralding the entropy of The Beatles. But rest assured, "The Eraser" was concocted – around 2000 when the singer bought his first laptop and started messing about with cut-up tracks and other curiosities – because Yorke needed "to do something on his own for a bit." Not because the guys from Radiohead had finally hung up their guitars, synths and glockenspiels. (By the way, the first solo outing by a Radiohead musician was Jonny Greenwood’s "Bodysong" released in 2003.)

With a little help from Godrich – and an arsenal of solipsistic computers, of course – here is a track-by-track review of "The Eraser."

The Eraser

The title track is about the indelibility of memory. "The more you try to erase me/The more, the more that I appear." Which reminds me of the premise of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Some things are forever ineradicable – like love or imminent doom.

Analyse

"It gets you down… There’s no time to analyze." Hard to wax analytical when the world is inundated with "sentences that don’t rhyme," "fences that you cannot climb" and "all that you cannot change." Creepy keyboard lines abound.

The Clock

Ethnic meanderings fed through a computer characterize The Clock. "Time is running out for us," sings Thom Yorke, seemingly counting down Armageddon while watching the evening news. Best to sing The Clock in a karaoke bar at the end of the world. This is a protest song, not in the tradition of Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan. More like Marvin the Martian.

Black Swan

One of my favorite tracks on the album, with a world-gone-to-hell chorus. "This is f*cked up, f*cked up/We are black swans/And for spare parts, we’ll be broken up." Dig also the aphorism: "People get crushed like biscuit crumbs."

Skip Divided

It is a song about "complete disconnection," with its foreboding beats and paranoid musings about numbers and locations.

Atoms for Peace

This is another favorite. Thom’s beautiful falsetto rings tenderly even while singing lines such as "No more talk about leaky holes in your brain/And no false starts." And oh, yeah: there is a casual mention of worms and flying saucer eyes.

A piece of trivia: during the recording of "The Bends," Thom and the rest of Radiohead watched Jeff Buckley playing a solo gig at The Garage in London. Thom came back to the studio and recorded his vocals for Fake Plastic Trees, breaking down afterwards. Buckley, according to the Radiohead singer, gave him the strength to sing in falsetto.

And It Rained All Night

This "electro-blues" number about The Flood reminds me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo, where the rains – relentless, invisible and indefatigable – don’t let up, and where a neurotic resident carries the bones of her dead ancestors in a bag, all the while creating a distinctive doomsday rhythm. This image pretty much sums up "The Eraser."

Harrowdown Hill

Named after the place in Oxfordshire where Iraq weapons-of-mass-destruction inspector Dr. David Kelly’s dead body was found in 2003.

Cymbal Rush

Thom and Jonny did a version of it at a May Day benefit show in London. The song’s wordless passages allow the listener to create his or her own monster. Sort of like an electronic version of The Blair Witch Project. Whatever Thom is singing (or thinking about) must be menacing.

The summation: "The Eraser" is all about a man peering into the abyss and not liking what he sees, the radio in his head picking up all sorts of apocalyptic signals. Nothing out of the norm for a band known for creating aural wallpaper to emptiness and other happy thoughts. We read existential novels to be miserable; we listen to Radiohead songs because we already are miserable.

You could see it this way: Radiohead’s gloomy duckling has grown into a black swan. All the while secretly thinking of stains and washing machines.

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