“Everybody, run, it looks like rain,” drawls Thom Yorke over the mechanised beat and lurid, tuba-aping synths of “Back in the Game”. The first single from the progtronic Tall Tales – the Radiohead frontman’s first full-length electronic collaboration with Yeovil-born producer/musician Mark Pritchard – offers disquieting fanfare for a dense, dystopian album. A record full of existential jitters, it addresses themes of human greed, mendacity, disconnection and the climate crisis. Vintage keyboard effects slip, slide and splash in looping melodies, like chunks of ice caps tumbling into the sea, while Yorke’s angsty vocal drifts at a sorrowful altitude.
It is, of course, a myth that Yorke only became interested in electronic music when Radiohead were working on 2000’s Kid A. While it’s true that they asked experimental electronic label Warp to send them their entire catalogue in 1999, Yorke was already familiar with their early releases, having played them as a student in Exeter back when he was picking up DJ gigs. It makes sense. The alienation and emotional askewness of the genre is a perfect fit for Yorke’s lyrical themes, counterbalancing what he has irritably described as the “prettiness” of his voice.
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, the affable Pritchard explained that he’s been friends with Yorke since 2012 (when Radiohead toured Australia, where he’s based). They first collaborated on the elegiac “Beautiful People” for Pritchard’s Under The Sun album, released in 2016 (the same year Radiohead dropped their last – and final? – album A Moon Shaped Pool). Yorke emailed Pritchard again during the lockdown of 2020: trapped at home, he was looking for music he could tinker with remotely, having paused the more organic, band-based work of his other side-project, The Smile. Pritchard pinged back 20 rough tracks composed over the previous decade, and the pair set to work sculpting the strange alien synthscape that became Tall Tales.
It’s a filmic sequence of 12 songs that scuttles into being with the sly, crablike bursts of beats and sulphurous, parping bass of “A Fake in a Faker’s World”. While Yorke’s falsetto reaches into the retro-synth, zero-gravity void for “the force that you cannot see/ Someone to look after me”, Pritchard artfully builds texture and momentum with insectoid percussion and panoramic organ effects that call back to Eighties-era Jean-Michel Jarre.
Yorke’s vocals melt into distortion against the slo-mo repetitions of “Ice Shelf”. His voice ping-pongs from high to low registers against the arcade-style “pew-pew” effects of “Gangsters”, then reaches into a Seventies R&B rasp over the syncopated handclaps and soft splashes of 808 on “The Conversation is Missing Your Voice”. He channels his inner Lou Reed to drone-rap “We sign the papers/ We line their pockets” over the trippy harmonium, tambourine and muffled drums of “The Men Who Dance in Stag’s Heads”. The track conjures hollow-laugh visions of tech bros folk-dancing on the moon.
At times, Yorke moonwalks into self-parody with lines such as, “What's the purpose?” But such sixth-formery is compensated by the gorgeous melody and elegant phrasing of “Bugging Out Again”, so beautiful it's hard to hear with your eyes open.
