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.
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