Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke : Tall Tales
One of the regular riffs on Radiohead is that they’re The Most Relentlessly Serious Band in the World. I mean, other contemporary contenders have at least put up a facade of an alternative, right? U2 had a bunch of fun little moments during their electro/industrial phase in the ‘90s, for example, and Rage Against the Machine’s politicized catalog is rife with glorious catharsis. But Thom Yorke helped launch his and his friend’s careers calling himself a creep, and for all of their artistry they’ve maintained this plateau of dread (as a band and individually) full of nihilism and pessimistic realism extending out from rock to soundtracks and IDM.
Only within the last few years has Yorke managed to suggest that the viral dance of 2011’s “Lotus Flower” video wasn’t an emotional fluke in his musical output. The trend continues, albeit in sneaky fashion, on a new collaborative album with electronica expert Mark Pritchard, Tall Tales. Pritchard’s parlayed his time in Global Communication into a long career as a producer, polyonymous solo artist, and duo-forming hired gun. His connections to the Radiohead universe stretch back to The King of Limbs remixes from 2011, eventually leading to Yorke requesting a trade of musical ideas—much like The Postal Service—during the COVID pandemic in 2020.
Pritchard and Yorke ended up using technologies old and new to power a set of hyperpop- and Krautrock-influenced compositions with the dour, overcast outlook in which Yorke and Radiohead have long traded. The pair’s Zoom calls and lyric-sharing ultimately landed on a set of music concerned with how identity can be manipulated both by isolation (“The White Cliffs”) and forced interactions (“This Conversation is Missing Your Voice”), as well as interpretations on the perils of capitalism (“Ice Shelf”). So the results collected on Tall Tales are still definitely not what you’d consider bright or chipper.
Where’s the fun, you ask? The only one really having any actually appears to be Yorke, who sounds here like he’s getting a perverse kind of glee in wearing affected and synthetic voices like disguises. His recent side project The Smile uses prog- and jazz-inflected sounds and arrangements to let a little light shine through in a way Radiohead never really has. You can hear genuinely happy moments in it. Tall Tales instead sees Yorke’s inhibitions drop by inhabiting different personalities—including Pritchard’s, if some interpretations of “Back in the Game” are to be believed.
Yorke sonically transforms into almost-Bono on multiple Tall Tales songs, including its most positive track, “The Spirit.” And at many other points he electronically manipulates his voice for artistic reasons: rhythmic element, failing computerized alert, even AI-generated women like the slam poet of the title track or the demented customer service advisor who “duets” with Yorke through the subdued electro-ska of “Happy Days.” The album’s halfway mark is where his cast of characters starts to expand and the Pritchard-led arrangements start picking up the pace, as “Gangsters” evokes rogues gathered at an underworld sitdown table grooving to Kraftwerk.
If the OK Computer track “Fitter, Happier” were stretched out to album length, you’ll get a sense of where Tall Tales rests in Radiohead canon. It’s a particularly dark, abstract moment in Mark Pritchard’s catalog, and it portrays Thom Yorke as the film or comic book villain with a convincing you-know-he’s-right argument for his dastardly plan.
Label: Warp
Year: 2025
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Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke : Tall Tales
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