Thom Yorke “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes”
The pressure of keeping a big secret can be immense. And the more personal the secret, the greater the pressure. This tension lies at the heart of Radiohead, generally, and Thom Yorke, specifically. Over the years, Radiohead albums have become cloaked deeper and deeper in intense non-disclosures, nervous silence and mumbled innuendos. The Yorke solo releases, which are more personal if only because he is not working with the rest of the band, feel perhaps even more secretive. They arrive, seemingly from nowhere, following a series of reluctant clues and misdirections. They tend to sound less like a set of songs for public consumption and more like very private meditations, disclosed through the force of jittery nerves.
Ultimately, the pressure to keep the music secretive, while simultaneously sharing in a discourse which aims to unpack and to value it, has been too great a task for for me. I largely walked away from Radiohead soon after “Kid A,” which means that all of the Yorke solo oeuvre is foreign to me. This is nothing against the artists. To the contrary, I love their music and appreciate their place as the Most Important Rock Band in the World. Hard stop.
That being said, those guys really are a lot of work. With Radiohead, you have to commit fully. You need to join the listservs and the Reddit threads. You need to belong to a special mailing list for clues. You need to have some sort of lyrical decoder, I think. You may even have to be vegan. I don’t know. Like I said, it’s been awhile. So, while they’ve been breaking ground for the last fifteen years, I’ve been staying away, listening to most every other interesting artist not named Radiohead.
However, these being essays mostly about solo artists, rather than bands, I saw a way into the Radioherd without fully drowning myself. I figured I could get a flavor of the genuine article through Thom Yorke’s increasingly significant solo records. And whereas “Eraser” seemed too seminal -- too close to the motherland -- and “Anima” seemed too recent and too obtuse as a starting point, 2014s “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes” seemed like a safe point of entry. It was described as “modest” by some. It was merely eight songs and less than forty minutes. It had the markings of something I could digest.
On the other hand, the album was a massive commercial experiment. Originally, it was announced through a typically enigmatic marketing campaign and eventually released as a paywall gated digital bundle on Bit Torrent for $6. Eventually, it would be released physically and on streaming services, but not before 4.5 million people would download the album and try to decipher the meaning of it all. Was there really any I way I could try to unpack something that, from the outside, seemed to be entirely about its packaging?
Fortunately for me, the answer was mostly “yes.” Not being one of those long suffering millions, I could consider simply listen to the album as music for consumption with some distance from the meta-text of it all. And, as an album, “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes” is underwhelming. Arriving in between “King of Limbs” and “Moon Shaped Pool,” and in the midst of the dissolution of his marriage, “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes” certainly has glimmers of its circumstances. Nigel Godrich is, as always, Yorke’s production partner. And the tape looping, knob turning, sound bending static set on top to clickety clackety glitches is insistent here and consistent with previous and future Radiohead material. In some ways, there is nothing shocking about this album.
What is novel, though, if not compelling, is just how personal it all sounds. The music, the scale and especially the words on “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes” all give one the impression that the record is meant as a conversation between the artist and himself. It hardly reads or sounds confessional. No. More like a meditation on his own insufficiency and the tenuous hinge between giving everything and giving in.
Yorke begins to spar with himself on “A Brain In a Bottle,” the album opener. With a humming synth loop, the sounds of electronic winds and electronic seagulls, the singer vacillates between wanting to break things and wanting to fall apart. Although the track is mostly slow and low, there is clearly something uncontrollable simmering. In the refrain, Yorke just tells himself to “chill, chill, chill.” Had I not read the lyrics, I would simply have thought that this track was an interesting, Radiohead-inspired song on a mix played at The Soho House in Miami. It sounds cerebral, but unobtrusive. With the added text, I know that the artist wants desperately to say something, but I don’t necessarily think that he wants to be heard.
“Guess Again” largely eschews the falsetto for Yorke’s normal range, which, as nervy as it is, sounds oddly relieving in comparison to the opener. The piano sounds tuned and engineered but it still sounds like a piano. The beat sounds like tinny handclaps. But it still sounds like a beat. And he does that Radiohead thing midway through where all the music, save for the piano, stops. It’s a breathtaking trick that Yorke has mastered. So, when he closes with the line, “I guess your number’s up,” you really believe that you’ve been caught and that you’ve been had.
The best moment of the album’s first half, though, is undoubtedly “The Mother Lode,” which is basically a beat-less Soul ballad. The minor chords and the ease with which Yorke switches from his lower register to falsetto evokes the ghost of 70s Al Green, albeit entirely devoid of groove. It’s an unusual and successful experiment. It’s also one of several tracks wherein he wrestles with that legendary Imposter Syndrome:
A hollow man, hollow hand puppet
I’m a clown, you don’t wanna know me
The knife behind the curtain
The truth is ordinary
“Truth Ray” and “Interference” both seem to find Yorke working through the conflict of a dissolving relationship, knowing full well that he is small, he has no control and, quite possibly, that he is wrong. And yet, he is well enough to be honest and pained enough to basically say, “You may pull away but that doesn’t mean I have to let go.” It’s a poignant sentiment, for sure.
The album (in its original form) concludes with a three song medley -- “There Is No Ice (For My Drink),” “Pink Section” and “Nose Grows Some.” The first of these three is a fairly interminable meditation on global warming, set to quiet, rubbery beats and the eventual clinking of ice against glass. It’s the equivalent of an IDM tone poem, which is to say that it’s barely a song and not easily consumable. “Pink Section” is mostly a brief instrumental, notable for the ways in which Yorke and Godrich get the piano to cry, the synth to whine and Yorke’s vocals to howl in the distance. It’s a fleeting, but pretty palette cleanser before the closer.
I’ve read others describe “Nose Grows Some” as the best song on the album. I’m not sure I agree other than to say that it is one of a few tracks that actually sounds like a song. The vocals are mixed slightly forward (middle back relative to the computer noise), the melody is a simple, prevalent loop of up and down notes and, if you listen closely, the story is discernible. We arrive mid-argument as our singer accuses his lover of lying. Her/their nose grows and grows, like the singer’s limbs grow. And yet, Yorke knows that he will never be as big as his lover. He will never win. He can only wait for the tide to either drown him or turn direction.
One year later, Yorke’s and his wife would be separated. Tragically, four years later, she died of cancer.
In spite of my lukewarm reaction, I do believe that “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes” is a gift. Most people have listened to it for free or for a huge discount relative to other albums. I streamed it, so it only cost me pennies. True — I didn’t especially enjoy it. Musically, I didn’t find it affecting. I consider it more of an idea -- a hypothesis really -- testing how an extraordinarily famous, but equally introverted, Rockstar can share something so private in a public way. In that way, I cannot answer whether the hypothesis proved valid. Only Thom Yorke can. To note, it would be six years until his next album, which was both more ambitious and decidedly more ubiquitous. Nonetheless, this album was still a gift for me in that it gave me a tiny foothold into the ideas of an important, brilliant artist. I’m choosing to let go of that hold and let Thom Yorke continue on as a private, semi-Italian man. I’ll let his secrets be his own. But I may just check back in with “Hail To The Thief.”