The More You Try To Erase Me - Thom Yorke's Solo Album

Thom Yorke
The Eraser
XL Recordings

Let me tell you, Thom Yorke is the real deal. The distinctive and enigmatic lead singer of Radiohead is a full-fledged genius. But like many musical geniuses before him, he can leap several steps ahead of us and leave us behind scratching our heads.

I'm a huge Radiohead fan. I've made this well-known on this blog several times. I like all of their released works to date. From the humble grunge of Pablo Honey to the ground-shaking and trend-setting O.K. Computer to the mystical space-rock of Amnesiac, I've liked them all.

But I'm not a big fan of Yorke's first solo album, Eraser. I think it was a necessary album for him. He needed to work out some of these musical concepts, but I can't really recommend that you buy this album.

I'm not a big fan of this album because it follows in the tracks of Radiohead's most abstract and difficult album, Amnesiac, but it doesn't seem to have the same accessible genius. This is more just Thom wanking with his laptop. But guess what? Thom has said that all along. He just wanted to work out these musical ideas in his head.

I think of this album as the musical equivalent of a math geek working on some crazy math problem and then posting it on his blog. It's pretty damn interesting to the math geeks in his circle, those people really in the know who understand the intracies of the mathematic aesthetic, but to non-math geeks, it's more of a head-scratching phenomenon. Maybe you can tell that it should be interesting, and some folks might try hard enough to actually get it, but most don't.

But if you're a die-hard Radiohead fan, you'll probably think you have to get this anyway. Go ahead. The song Eraser, the album's title-track, is actually pretty damn good. The next best songs are the The Clock and Black Swan. Both remind me of Amnesiac. But overall, I can't recommend this album for the casual Radiohead fan.

(But all that being said, I'm an ex-math geek, and this album is starting to grow on me. We'll see...)

(Damn, everytime I listen to this album I like it better. Check back with me in a few weeks. It's a subtle, subtle album.)