The Smile : Cutouts
They play us for fools. “Foreign Spies,” the opener of The Smile‘s third album Cutouts, plays out like Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner celebrating Kid A about as deeply as we ourselves did not too long ago, laying down a modernized-through-retroism take on “Everything In Its Right Place” with ’80s art pop synth patches and sequencers playing out like a dream sequence in a film like Labyrinth, all architecture and stateliness underlying the dreaming. This mood never returns: instead, the remainder of the album, inexplicably, beautifully, reads more like a recuperative collision of those three great conjoined records of the early 80s: Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and King Crimson’s Discipline. There are rolling math rock arpeggios, single note lines lapping over each other like waves, or elastic guitar noises like the kind Adrian Belew made over two of those aforementioned records, or deep funk and dub groove that at last feels sincere in their hands rather than an art rock white boy put-on (as great as those Radiohead funk moments were). None of these are moves that precisely would shock any longtime listener of Radiohead, the group to whom this is somewhat knowingly a followup or perhaps spin-off of. The difference here: Tom Skinner is the best drummer these two have played with hands down (sorry, Selway!) and is able to follow their alacritous and genre-agnostic compositions with aplomb.
If Radiohead at their best were a schizophrenic dream, nervy like the best of new wave on one hand versus a rich and sensuous cool groove on the other, The Smile have settled into something like an alchemical union of those two poles. It turns out removing the largely straight-ahead if deeply inventive drum patterns of Selway for the more twitchy and technically proficient rhythmic ideas of Skinner lets Yorke and Greenwood play nervous and comfortable at the same time, gives a sense of groove and efflorescence where the dominating mood of Radiohead is a kind of near-weeping alienation.
There is moodiness here still, of course, but it reads more vampiric and rejoicing, having passed through the threshing lacuna of those final days of Radiohead themselves, marked by divorce and cancer and death, now onto this wider half-manic technicolor space. The comparison of the cover of this record to Kid A feels deliberate, as does their previous record with The King of Limbs; this is very much what comes after, a loose-limbed joyful bursting even amongst the dour and threatening moods of wolves on the prowl. “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” guitar lines here collide against rich chromaticism and a drummer who is more Bruford than Ringo, demanding equal place among these pieces.
The Smile at this venture bring to mind another trio following up a deeply acclaimed group in the form of Isis being eventually replaced by Sumac. In each case, a key figure or figures dial into the jazz elements present in the former, the improvisation and group dynamics, and using this newfound focus to transform the latency of what was brought to that group in the first place. Wall of Eyes was the first time the Smile felt like themselves, not just “Radiohead plus”; here, they retreat somewhat in terms of identity but in a way that solidifies the core of what differentiates them. These are songs one could easily imagine the other three players of Radiohead joining in on, but which would sound deeply different in that group. Radiohead playing next to Sons of Kemet would have felt like one group giving the other a rub; The Smile playing next to the same would feel like these players taking notes (I understand the irony with this choice, to be clear!). While we await their equivalent of a collaboration with Keiji Haino, the act that blew the doors off of Sumac and made their potential new directions explode into a wildfire of creative output, this is a strong and commanding demonstration that these players still have new ground to cover and, more importantly, more excellent songs still in the tank to deliver to us.
Label: XL
Year: 2024
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The Smile : Cutouts
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