Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard first crossed paths in 2012, after Radiohead, on an evening off tour in Sydney, turned as much as the dextrous producer’s pageant set. The 2 of them chatted over dinner in a gathering that Pritchard, maybe surprisingly, portrays as a superbly informal affair. On the suitable is an inscrutable titan of art-rock, presumably taking pictures daggers across the room whereas cryptically consuming a salad. On the left is the bespectacled interloper with extra manufacturing aliases than anybody can rely, propounding a hare-brained scheme to get collectively and rustle up some tunes.
However vacationers of the dance underground represented mythic figures to Yorke. By 2012, he was already a number of years right into a self-imposed life sentence of atonement for his half in among the best rock music ever made. Cult considerations like Hyperlink and Reload—Pritchard’s sprawling constellation within the prolonged Warp universe—had way back bewitched the singer, a person who nonetheless appears personally affronted that Radiohead are extra standard than LFO. So “yeah, yeah,” Yorke advised him. “Simply ship me no matter you need.”
Practically a decade later they began work on Tall Tales. By then, Pritchard had launched the scenic 2016 album Below the Solar—that includes his first collaboration with Yorke—and developed from a fiendish dance stylist right into a mellow elder statesman. Throughout pandemic lockdowns, Yorke took a trove of Pritchard instrumentals and gave them hell, shuffling synths and disembowelling basslines earlier than sending all of it again for evaluation. Possibly it was lockdown fever, however Yorke noticed a chance to take some unusual vocal turns—the croaks, chirrups, siren songs, and sneering monologues of a voice ceaselessly lashing out at its inconvenient magnificence. An opportunity, in brief, for 2 critical musicians to limber up and have enjoyable.
And that’s precisely what transpires on roughly half of Tall Tales. “The White Cliffs” takes a cosmic journey to the darkish facet of Air’s Moon Safari; “The Males Who Dance in Stag’s Heads” is Pleasure Division’s “Ambiance” dreaming of a medieval folks ballad, Yorke’s narrator a mystic Lou Reed. “The Spirit” is a bolt of silvery pleasure, keyboard pulse and vocal line in rapturous concord, life-loving lyrics spiked with solely a touch of irony: “I want you effectively/Pray for peace/A magic spell that sends you all to sleep.”
“The Spirit” steals the present on observe six, and the album might in all probability have began there. Yorke and Pritchard tinkered away on Tall Tales for some three years, which isn’t readily obvious within the sequencing or enhancing. Eight-minute opener “A Faux in a Faker’s World” is alluring however impenetrable, a union of outros asserting its proper to kind a music. When the ambient paean of “Ice Shelf” follows, you suppose: Here’s a darkish, grim file. “Bugging Out Once more” higher displays the playfulness to return, however by the clunky “Again within the Sport,” the duo’s mothballed productions really feel laborious, faintly paying homage to that awkward interval when Damon Albarn was composing Gorillaz songs on his iPad.
