Major break-ups, deaths, and Thom Yorke records - pretty much the only stories Pitchfork News wakes up on a weekend to break. A couple of Saturdays back, we caught wind that Yorke was planning his first-ever foray into, um, solitary territory ("i don't wanna hear that word solo," the man wrote in a W.A.S.T.E. e-mail), on a forthcoming album to be titled The Eraser. And now, we've had the distinct pleasure of hearing the album in its entirety. The Eraser is a sumptuous, Nigel Godrich-produced layer cake of plaintive piano, haunting synth squalls, and chugging guitars built atop skittish programmed beats and devoured by Thom Yorke's anguished ruminations on the pressures and paranoias attendant to fame and expectation. And no, it's not a techno record.
Regarding The Eraser, Yorke also wrote "inevitably it is more beats & electronics. but its [sic] songs," and that pretty much sums it up. The record is song-oriented to a perhaps surprising degree-- no instrumentals, all tracks pretty much in the four-minute range, mostly standard time signatures-- and emphasizes the trademark textural richness of Radiohead and Godrich.

- Matthew Solarski (Pitchfork Media)

Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. the eraser
2. analyse
3. the clock
4. black swan
5. skip divided
6. atoms for peace
7. and it rained all night
8. harrowdown hill
9. cymbal rush