I Listened to The Smile’s ‘Wall of Eyes’.
I was shocked when this band sent out a new single so soon after they’d just released their incredible debut only a year and a half ago. The album opens that single, ‘Wall of Eyes’, a bossa nova that deteriorates as it builds, like some sort of revelatory body horror. It sets the tone for the album perfectly, as it tells of a clean garden row, but the uncertainty of what might come from its fertile soil. This album is alive, but more like the depth of the ocean where there are things yet undiscovered, skeletons adapted to conditions we might consider harsh but that organisms have perfected. Expect anything.
Where 2022’s A Light For Attracting Attention celebrated a lot of the camp’s rock chops, this album dives deeply into the ambient electronic leaning angles of the outfit. Songs are raw at their core, loops that you can find distinctly, like a face. During the span of each track, these faces become expressions, emoting and tunneling screams. They become dead stares. Comparing these tracks to Radiohead feels like a benign endeavor, the easy way out, but using Yorke and Greenwood’s original band as a basis for comparison helps to contextualize the journey altogether. The resemblance to initial influences (Can being the major one) shows up a lot more transparently on this one, as the songs are small ideas in their genesis phases, and they are compounded into more massive structures slowly over time. Where Radiohead songs feel more like deeply plotted novels, massive cinematic filmscapes, the songs from The Smile dash and dart like novellas. They speak in harsher and more passionate bullets like a terse short film.
The architecture of a song like ‘Under Our Pillows’ resonates like a strange post-punk tenement, the angular guitars echoing a sound something like an At the Drive-In geometric helix, tapping out an alien morse code. Bass rumbles like a rolling liquid. And in its exit, the center cannot, does not hold, and breaks apart into a chaotic cellular structure. The dynamics on this record are widespread. ‘Friend of a Friend’ feels like a meditation, a satellite slowly separating from its orbit. It spreads its signal slowly across an entire galaxy, tendrils pulsing out a mix between a cry for help and a frontierer’s desire for land. This one feels like a Greenwood composition, all kinds of frayed thread and coloring outside of the lines. Driving the speed limit, but on the shoulder. This is followed by ‘I Quit’, a rounded and soft thrush of organic matter, skirting the outlines of dream. The voice gleams in and out in an icy fuzz like an ectoplasmic moss. Through these three tracks, right at the heart of the record, there’s such a wide variety of sound and construction. They each glow from within, but from varying sources, whether industry or bioluminescence or galactic heat.
As much as many of the parts are slimmed down and far more reined in by the individual players, there’s an instrumental mastery at part, one which showcases that the relationship between Tom Skinner and the Radiohead boys has been strengthened and fortified, especially after a powerfully successful tour. It’s tough to think about this band as ‘new’, but it’s been an incredible union for these three and as long as they plan to create music in this vein, I’ll continue to gravitate towards it. I will definitely be talking about this record again during the End of the Year list season. But until then, I’ll listen and evolve beside them.
For Fans Of: Radiohead, Can, Blonde Redhead
Check Out: Teleharmonic
