In the weeks since Apple violently forced U2 down the headphone jack of every mobile device in the known universe, in rock’s first confirmed case of musical waterboarding, the Ché Guevaras of alternative music have started revolting against the manipulative online iStablishment. In what genuinely feels like a turning point in artist-to-fan distribution – to the benefit of both parties – they’ve started embracing the web’s stickier strands.
By releasing the first paid-for bundle distributed via peer-to-peer service BitTorrent in order to bypass “the self-elected gatekeepers” of digital music (iTunes, Spotify and other such artist exploiters and Bono enforcers), Thom Yorke requires you to swashbuckle with the online pirates and risk contracting the most savage malware known to cyber-troll to access his second solo album, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes.
The beauty of the scheme is that any tech-savvy muso with a laptop can do it. And the same, largely, goes for the record. If Radiohead’s chief 21st century innovation was to popularise sparse synthetic experimentation over overt rock melody, that blueprint has since been adopted as Bible and bedrock for the xx, James Blake and their legion of imitators. Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes merely sounds like the commander-in-chief slipping quietly into the ranks of cannon fodder.
Stripped of the full-band textures of Radiohead’s last album The King of Limbs and reining in the melodic flourishes that made his 2006 debut solo album The Eraser among his most accessible releases this century, much of Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes sounds distinctly unambitious. Take the album’s seven-minute centrepiece, There Is No Ice (For My Drink); consisting of an off-the-peg Hyperdub-on-factory-settings deep house beat, skittering clicks and throbs and ominous backwards babble, it’s the sound of failing to get to sleep in boutique camping when you’ve bagged a pitch too close to the all-night bar. That it bleeds into an amorphous two-minute coda called Pink Section doesn’t help, since, besides a few warped piano chords, that’s essentially the mewling of a hundred ghost cats who died miserably in a fire.
Elsewhere, he retreads old Radiohead ground. Guess Again! glitches-up Pyramid Song while A Brain in a Bottle is a sister piece to The King of Limbs’ Lotus Flower, Yorke adopting a falsetto soul croon over an elasticated bassline and the Doppler-effected siren of a wasp ambulance. “Think I’m gonna go to pieces now,” he lilts, his voice characteristically fragile and wounded. Where he really offers something different is in the electronically distended R&B of The Mother Lode, or on Interference, an enchanting paean of dislocation – “in the future we will change our numbers and lose contact” – seemingly played on ice marimba in a church made of phase.
Just as no one’s marching around the Large Hadron Collider shouting “nice Boson, Higgs, but that was last year, what the hell else you got?”, it’s unfair to expect Yorke to dismantle and resolder the circuit boards of modern music every time he releases a record. But it’s disappointing to find him bobbing disconsolately along in the soul noir slipstream of the likes of Truth Ray and Nose Grows Some: a glitchy cockroach here, an icicle cathedral there, plant pot drumbeats all over the shop. His tried-and-tested tactic of whacking out an album with 15 seconds’ notice via some Nasa-level new technology – and only releasing physical versions months later in the form of a £300 playable trout – is effective in bypassing the self-elected gatekeepers of popular opinion, but here the process is more impactful than the product. Indeed, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes is so deviously understated you wonder if it’s a sly cover for the seeding of Skynet.
