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The Eraser

by

Thom Yorke

 
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The Eraser
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Radiohead's frontman goes solo.

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    “The more you try to erase me, the more that I appear.” Has Thom Yorke ever uttered a more revealing statement of intent? The refrain at the heart of his first solo album is simultaneously cryptic and clear, a declaration of power that acknowledges Yorke’s evolving presence as a sort of specter. It also serves a set of songs that benefit from being addressed as sketches more than songs per se.

    With the conspicuous absence of Radiohead fated to haunt The Eraser before its first note ever tumbled down, Yorke crafted an intimate collection that sounds like the work of one man alone in a room full of instruments and glowing electronic gear. Flecks of guitar and thumbed measures of bass angle songs like “The Clock” and “Black Swan” close to the lean of Radiohead, but the entire album evinces a powerful sense of more that creeps in all the more powerfully for the sense of withholding at play. The sparse backdrops also help to foreground Yorke’s voice, which proves duly stirring in songs like “Harrowdown Hill” and the title track. That’s the one in which he considers the effect of his own erasure, but Yorke makes it all perfectly paradoxical by sounding as strong and disquieting as he does in anything by Radiohead.

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