2024-01-27 08:14:27
Wall of Eyes likes its title from old ones Radiohead-Days borrowed, lets The Smile but finally grow together into a well-rounded unit for the future through the reuse of stored mothership material.
That Nigel Godrich with the upcoming Idles-Plate was busy, The Smile but didn’t want to wait for their producer for their second album, but wanted to take the momentum of their first tour and the songs they wrote along with it, and that’s why Sighs-Acquaintance Sam Petts-Davies for the recordings of Wall of Eyes committed, not only proves to be a disconnect from the mother ship Radiohead as beneficial, but also to the character of The Smile to blossom: the sound of the A Light for Attracting AttentionIn direct comparison to the 2022 debut, Successor’s is more natural, softer and more organic, places more emphasis on atmosphere, where the songwriting is also more calm, calm and subversive.
In this regard, the most ideal option for direct comparison is the splinging, pointedly tapped one Under Our Pillows on, which is in the slipstream of Thin Thing developed into a somnambulistic run-up into space orbits, and with the bass grumblingly placed in the display, it fades away into a standstill of a spherical sound cosmos on the edge of the cacophony in the orchestra pit. Also like I Quiet Later, contemplatively flowing over the keyboard of melancholy, wandering through ethereal worlds of sound as curiously as cautiously, would perhaps not have been possible with Godrich in this colorful volume.
Actually sets Wall of Eyes In a much more harmonious sequencing, it actually draws on the atmospheric depth of the understatement, steering the dynamics onto a more homogeneous track. Where The Smile with the hodgepodge A Light for Attracting Attention Having generated attention on many fronts, the second album, as a coherent album, demonstratively foregoes any particularly catchy songs or hits, let alone crisp rockers like You Will Never Work in Television Again. Everything now seems more relaxed, the compositions are stretched out in terms of playing time, even Tom Skinner’s virtuoso drumming takes a step back more inconspicuously, while Greenwood weaves his skills as a soundtrack composer more into the nautical, otherworldly arrangements and balances out the highlights less drastically balanced structure.
The final outburst in the redemptive climax of the first single Bending Hectic (which initially bubbles a bit atonally against the out-of-tune line, letting itself drift with an underlying jazzy tension, lurking, but loosening up more and more dreamily until the cinematographic color detaches itself from the wall and the crescendo creates a roasting riff sound wave with an almost doomy quality Drama over the top) is the most excessive and unbridled outward momentum of an otherwise very intimate and soulfully introverted record.
More exemplary of the whole thing is the second forerunner, which at first glance seems almost inconspicuous, in the form of the title track, which as an opener creates a kind of reserved escapism with relaxed acoustic strumming, relaxed samba rhythm percussion, moody strings and atmospheric space, a few Electronic noises, laughter, reverb and a lot of space lead a bit disharmoniously not far from a potential Yorke solo journey on elegiac paths, which at the other end of the credits and epilogue You Know Me! the circle like an ambient reverberation 4 Minute Warning out of Elbow-Visibility shimmering closes.
In between, the spectrum spreads out its amplitudes in a beautiful sound. The enchanting one Teleharmonic develops after Peaky Blinders in the sensitivity a gentle groove and Read the Room stacks with atonally oscillating guitars to transform into a herbaceous jam and the shy one that has gone through several incarnations and title changes Friend of a Friend has become an instant favorite, stumbling along its piano line since the first tour, into a charming beauty whose staging finds a nostalgic romanticism in the misappropriation and underlines the band’s pop factor in an anachronistic way.
The evolution of The Smile always progresses in a familiar way, strolling across the board at a consistently high level, although this time it is hardly distilled down to individual neuralgic goosebump points or laid out in a generally overwhelming way, but by looking inward, it finds the horizon in order to go beyond it A Light for Attracting Attention to grow within the Radiohead framework: “Don’t think you know me/ Don’t think that I am everything you say…“.
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