The Smile - A Light for Attracting Attention
The Smile
A Light for Attracting Attention
By: Dean Washmore
There’s beauty glowing and throbbing throughout A Light for Attracting Attention. It is a professional and class record that fits together like a nice 1000-piece puzzle.
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.
Radiohead bandmates Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood decided to team up and finish up some songs they’d left unfinished during the COVID lockdown.
They pulled in long-time Radiohead producer and SoundGod, Nigel Godrich, then reunited with the rest of Radiohead members to put together a brand new Radiohead album to blow our minds.
Nope. That’s not how it happened.
Instead of reaching out to Ed O’Brien, Colin Greenwood, and Phil Selway on drums - Thom and Jonny enlisted Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner.
It begs the question: If Thom and Jonny are sitting on a bunch of unfinished tracks - why not put the band together and make a Radiohead album? Why make a side project that could easily be described as Radiohead-esque?
We’ll get to our theories - but it is ultimately irrelevant.
The result is obvious: A Light for Attracting Attention sounds like a stripped-down and simplified Radiohead album.
It would be unfair to label the record as “almost as good as a Radiohead album.”
It’s unjust to Radiohead and unjust to The Smile.
While it may have served the trio to distance their sound further from Radiohead to avoid the comparisons, A Light for Attracting Attention thankfully sounds less like the scraps from any Radiohead project and more like a cohesive journey.
The opening track, “The Same,” is a brooding, eerie, hate to say it, Radioheady bruiser that builds and haunts with an itchy atmosphere. Because the song is glued together with an unusual and offbeat drum pattern, it would be easy to think, “well, clearly, the whole album will sound like Radiohead.”
It does, and it doesn’t.
That sound is quickly shrugged off on the second track, “The Opposite,” which is more of a nod your head Thom Yorke groove. It’s also our first real taste of a new drummer - showcasing a more fun, loose pattering than Selway’s tactical precision.
There’s beauty glowing and throbbing throughout A Light for Attracting Attention. It is a professional and class record that fits together like a nice 1000-piece puzzle.
Songs like “The Smoke” are great examples of how A Light for Attracting Attention really isn’t a Radiohead clone. The tune is a simple groove with some light horns. It allows itself to breathe into a bare rock groove and avoid getting pulled into the complicated mechanics of a Radiohead track.
As for the 'why' behind not just putting Radiohead back in the studio to complete some unfinished tracks - some have speculated it symbolizes the other half of the band's desire to enjoy their personal lives, not ready to re-enter the arena (and maybe never will).
A better theory would be that The Smile respectfully keeps Radiohead a safe and sacred space. It allows bandmates to work together, doing what they love in the aural stage they so uniquely share without tainting the church of Radiohead.
Whether you're a lifelong Radiohead fan or never have heard of "Paranoid Android," - A Light for Attracting Attention is a cerebral and patient rock/post-punk album.
If nothing else, it establishes Jonny Greenwood as one of the upper echelon guitar/songwriter greats of recent memory.
