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A new Yorke state of mindRadiohead frontman's album 'The Eraser' is a work of creative autonomy, but it isn't the launch of a solo careerBy Jonathan Perry, Globe Correspondent | July 9, 2006Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, singer for one of the biggest and most influential rock bands in the world, will release a debut solo album, ``The Eraser," on Tuesday. The question of course is why? And, more specifically, why now?Yorke's seemingly simple and reasonable step has, inevitably, been cause for speculation about the future of his Grammy-winning group of sonic avatars, especially since none of his bandmates perform s on his new disc. (There are a few sampled fragments of the band's music.)Yorke seems acutely aware of the consternation his solo effort might cause listeners. So he has sought to quell the fears and tea-leaf reading that contend ``The Eraser" is a signal that the British band might be breaking up. He even tried to keep the work a secret until after Radiohead went on tour as a way of preventing speculation that the demise of the group was imminent. (That effort failed when the album was leaked online more than a month before its release.) Yorke even went so far as to warn fans and blogger obsessives not to make too much of it.``As you know, the band are now touring and writing new stuff and getting to a good space so I want no [expletive] about me being a traitor or whatever splitting up. . .," Yorke wrote in a recent letter to a Radiohead fan club. ``This was all done with their blessing. And I don't wanna hear that word solo. Doesn't sound right."And yet ``The Eraser" is without question a Yorke solo album -- a mostly solitary exercise, a work of creative autonomy. Yorke has said that much of the material for ``The Eraser" grew out of boredom, as well as a long-lingering, inchoate desire to try something different with the sounds he hears in his head and saves as files on his laptop. Wisely, he enlisted longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich to help make his errant, videodrome dreams cohere.In some ways, the disc is more cohesive than the more abstract Radiohead outings that sealed the band's reputation as the post-modern progeny of musical shape-shifters Pink Floyd, Can, and Brian Eno.``Please excuse me but I got to ask," Yorke queries with uncharacteristic coyness on the title track. ``Are you only being nice because you want something?" It's a rare blunt question from a man who's spent the past decade obfuscating.With a restless, longing lyric framed by an edgy arrangement of bustling percussion and spooky, creepshow synths, ``And It Rained all Night" is a four-minute portrait of urban desolation, inspired by a New York City rainstorm. But even as he's held captive by his loneliness, growing more desperate with each verse, Yorke builds a world of pulsating life around him. The city never sleeps, after all. ``Black Swan" is constructed on a clipped, quietly taut riff, a restrained neo-funk sketch drawn on a less-is-more groove.Sure, the now-familiar, skittering electro-bleeps and synth burbles are here, but Yorke's impressionistic voice, which he has always treated as just another instrument in the mix, has never been clearer or more direct. Here, it's scrubbed dry of its usual reverb bath and moves to the melodic forefront of muted tracks such as ``Analyse" and ``Atoms for Peace."Nevertheless, this is Thom Yorke and not Bono we're talking about, so a palpable sense of free-floating, perpetually dissipating ennui remains. Or, as Yorke puts it on ``Harrowdown Hill," one of the strongest tracks on ``The Eraser": ``I feel me slipping in and out of consciousness." Indeed.Maybe the impetus for ``The Eraser" was something as banal as this: Yorke just needed to get it out of his system. Let's not forget that the need to experiment, to move beyond the safety of convention, has always been Radiohead's guiding force, dating to the days of its breakthrough MTV hit, 1993's ``Creep." At the time, that song was dismissed (along with the band) as a flashy bit of alt-rock fluff with a disaffected lyric and cool, stuttering guitar hook, nothing more.Improbable as it might have seemed at the time, Radiohead managed to shed one-hit wonder status by releasing ``The Bends," an audacious and ambitious follow-up, in 1995. From there, it jettisoned radio-friendly rock altogether with a trio of meditations (``OK Computer," ``Kid A," ``Amnesiac") that carried a current of paranoia and profound alienation. For Radiohead, glacial silences, not guitar solos, were the means of creating its dystopian universe.At its most courageous (detractors would say self-indulgent), the band expressed its willingness to risk losing a chunk of its audience early on. In doing so, Radiohead issued an implicit long-term challenge: dare to come with us and embrace new ideas. This strategy, if it's as calculated as that, gave listeners more credit than most rock bands give their audience, or even themselves. Yorke's hunger to take a detour from his day job and make ``The Eraser" is completely in keeping with this ethos.Unlike the vanity solo projects undertaken by pop stars eager to feed their egos or revive their faltering careers, Yorke's motives appear genuine, modest even. ``The Eraser" feels much more like a personal side project than the launch of a solo career. And with a new Radiohead album reportedly in the works, the clear message from this most cryptic of bands seems to be that neither Yorke nor his metamorphosing outfit are splitting anytime soon.Breaking up, after all, is something ordinary bands do. And Radiohead has never been ordinary.
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