The Smile Gleams With New Single “Bending Hectic”

July 12, 2023 — Leave a comment

Thom Yorke’s voice once again swirls amidst cataclysmic guitar tones, rapid fire rhythms, and bent strings, and once again everything is in its right place.

By now, if you’ve read anything about The Smile, the jazz/rock/alternative fusion band formed by Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke, you know that the name of the band at first appears to be a misnomer considering the timbre and tone of Yorke and company’s main body of work in Radiohead. It’s not. The name is borrowed from a poem by 20th Century British poet Ted Hughes. Hughes’ “The Smile” is not a very happy poem. It is tough to understand, analyze, and derive a coherent meaning from, which of course makes it great, much like its musical namesake. Yorke and Greenwood can’t help but comment on the plight of contemporary consciousness and its negative effect on our shared world in their art and music. They continue to do so with shockingly engaging yet challenging musical and lyrical output that not only takes its cues from rock, jazz, and literary modernism, but everyday events and personalities. With one excellent album already released and plenty of touring miles piling up, The Smile tease what they are up to next, with “Bending Hectic.”  Fortunately for us, “Bending Hectic”  sounds like more of what we heard on The Smile’s debut A Light for Attracting Attention, but with the grand, sweeping epic songwriting that characterized mid-career Radiohead. With their forthcoming, as yet untitled, sophomore album be The Bends to Pablo Honey? Time will tell. For now though, “Bending Hectic” will keep us tied over and tied up in repeated listens. 

Thom Yorke has a degree in English and Fine Art from Exeter University, and it’s easy to hear and see the influence of his studies in his music, and in both Radiohead and The Smile’s album art (art which he collaborates with Stanley Donwood on). So, when Yorke is singing about a car crash that happens as the “vintage soft top/from the sixties” he is driving goes “skidding’ ‘round the hairpin/a sheer drop down” you know that this is really some elaborate metaphor for life lived in the modern context. Yorke has a thing for the dangers of automobiles, car crashes, and their aftermath. “Airbag,” “Killer Cars,” and the visuals in the “Karma Police” video are just a few examples. Here the lyrics invoke in the listener an even more harrowing feeling when Yorke sings, “The ground is coming up for me now/We’ve gone over the edge/If you’ve got something to say/Say it now.” Couple that with the fact that he “swears he’s seeing double,” “time is kind of frozen,” and “I’m letting go of the wheel” (not to let Jesus take it), and the metaphorical line is blurred between an accident and a suicide. It’s the perfect example of Yorke creating tension and ambiguity in his lyrics that perfectly reflect that aforementioned “life lived in the modern context” and all the anxieties and ambiguities that cling to it, and us. 

Musically, “Bending Hectic” is the longest single ever released by Yorke that he was a part of compositionally. It beats “Paranoid Android” by over a minute and a half, and The King of Limbs era B-Side “Supercollider” by 58 seconds. It is 8 full minutes of he, Greenwood, and Skinner slowly building up towards a climactic “crash” of grinding guitar riffs that melodically personify the crunching force of gravity, again metaphorically representing the anxiety and, paradoxically, the release that such a crushing can bestow. Once one hits the ground and the tension of the impact is over, there can be nothing but a type of relief. Although, there rarely is a resolution that is acceptable after such an impact. 

The message isn’t all dark and modernistically existentialist though. Yorke does repeat the phrase, “Despite these slings/Despite these arrows/I force myself to turn.” One doesn’t have to go off the edge of the cliff. A society doesn’t have to give in to prejudice. A nation doesn’t have to go off the edge of a militaristic brink. A species doesn’t have to kill itself slowly along with its native habitat. Don’t call Yorke and company (whatever that company might be) depressing. He sees a way out and through our most self-destructive tendencies. He’s just a master of illustrating them to make a point, and that sets him, and The Smile, apart. 

The Smile Tour Dates

Listen to The Smile

XL Recordings 

Sevendust (Live) and The Decline of (Insert Your Favorite Rock Cliche Here).

May 28, 2023 — Leave a comment

She was with what was obviously a significant other, and said significant other’s friend. Young, pretty, and worth significant other’s undivided attention, she awkwardly bopped and tried to do something with her hands that vaguely resembled an atypical rock fan fist pump, or bump, but her shoulders soon ended up in a slump. All that was left to do was for her to throw her hands up in the air in a WTF pose and shout, “I don’t know this!” The attempt to pose was muffed. The hip head bang, fist pump, and (insert your own rock concert goer behavior trope here) was out of reach. The concert, as yet to begin, was Sevendust. The pre-show song was “Jesus Built My Hot Rod” by Ministry. The death of interesting rock and its legacy was complete. Welcome to the post-post modern post-rock world.

Way back in 1997, the summer and ensuing fall of 1997 to be exact, I was still trying to reconcile in my mind that U2 were still a rock band while slowing realizing that OK Computer was the greatest rock release ever (I’m not so sure of this anymore), and not giving a (expletive deleted) who Godsmack and Sevendust were. Albums by all these bands came out that spring and summer. Ah, the good ole’ days, four rock albums of note, which included the greatest rock release ever, OK Computer (I am sure of this again), released within months of each other. Who said rock was dead by the end of the 90s?

At the time though, I couldn’t tell the difference between Godsmack and Sevendust, and honestly didn’t care. Backward hat wearing, pant cuff dragging, trailer park meth chic fashionista dolts drug knuckles to the songs of these guys, along with Gastonia NC’s favorite son’s band, Limp Bizkit’s music. This pretentious English major who took his rock music way too seriously (and still does) would have nothing to do with the decline and fall of the rock music movement that just a few years ago was the antithesis of bros who bragged about limp biscuits. Thom Yorke and his pretty voice, weird modernist themes, and rock guitar noise was good enough for this burgeoning rock critic elitist, thank you very much. You couldn’t write a grad school paper on modernist themes in “I Did It All For The Nookie” for (expletive deleted once again’s) sake!

So what the hell am I doing at a Sevendust concert in Greenville, SC? Well, despite being the same pretentious, now English TEACHER, who still takes his rock music too seriously, I grew an affinity for Sevendust over the years, most of which rests upon their excellent 2003 album Seasons. They also had a really good acoustic album released around the same time on which they covered “Hurt” by NIN (years before Johnny Cash mumbled his way through it). It was obvious that the dudes in Sevendust had good taste in music. Most Durst-wannabes didn’t really know who or what the real deal with NIN was. And, yes I do, thank you very much…being a serious(ly pretentious) rock critic and all…

Speaking of NIN, “We’re In This Together Now” also blared over the club speakers before the show, to which some of the young crowd managed a good-hearted headbanging. That song is a staple on 90s and 00s good ole’ boy local rock stations like 93.3 The Planet, so some of the kiddos knew it. What they didn’t know how to do was mosh. They did get rowdy enough to cause Sevendust singer Lajon Witherspoon to engage in crowd control. “Move in a circle! Yeah, that’s it! Put your hands in the air! Clap like this! I wanna see everybody’s hands!” If you are moving in a circle and not a chaotic slam-dance and your hands in the air, no one gets hurt. Good move Lajon.

Still, plenty of mid twenties to mid thirties backwards hat and “Let’s Go Brandon!” t-shirt wearing dudes with tattoos worth more than their homes plunged into the “pit.” Smiles and silly back slapping fun to be had all around. I’m honestly surprised that there were no trigger warnings, stuffed trauma bunnies, or safety words explained and enforced. Not that I had any intention of entering said pit or need of any of the aforementioned escape routes. My moshing days are long gone…

…kinda like the spirit of the shows from my youthful days gone by. Yes, I’m going to say exactly what my parents said to me back in the 80s and 90s. “You kids don’t know what good music is.” This isn’t to say that Sevendust isn’t good music. They are the only band from the late 90s misogynist, Woodstock 99 riot inducing, “nu-metal” numbskulls to actually have class and talent, despite the fact that one of their 50 something guitarists still wears a backwards ball cap on stage. There were no assaults, sexual or otherwise, to be observed-that’s one thing the kids seem to have sort of figured out better than the Durst-generation. They pretty much keep their hands to themselves. An appreciation for good, thoughtful, rock music, like Ministry (insert Gen X snark), was definitely under assault though. And soon it was pretty much declared dead.

(Sevendust played The Foundry in Greenville SC with local heroes Seven Year Witch and Black River Rebels and the sound this time was better than it was when Everclear surprisingly played Greenville at the venues only other “big” rock show).