I would like to take a moment and talk about pretentiousness, a pop music identifier overused as a stand-in for "so serious, it sucks."
Certainly, pop music is supposed to be fun; "pop" itself denotes light, fluffy, easily digestible tunes. But it must be recognized that at this moment in time, pop music, in its many permutations, is the world's most prevalent form of music, and as such will be this era's main contribution to the historical annals of sound.
Thus, there is a need for musical artists who want to elevate pop music beyond something with a good beat that you can dance to, artists who can transform disposable pieces of plastic into works of art.
Sure there are some missteps in this direction (most 1970s prog rock, any post-"The Joshua Tree" U2 albums), but picking up a paintbrush doesn't make you Michelangelo. Records like "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "Dark Side of the Moon," and artists like Talking Heads and Sufjan Stevens do not attempt to impress by affecting greater importance; they're impressive because they are important.
That's why anybody who dismisses Radiohead as pretentious is an out-and-out idiot. There's no questioning it's currently the best band in the world — what else do you call a group that's so boldly innovative, musically adept and emotionally effective.
Despite rumors to the contrary, 2006 will not see the release of a new Radiohead album. Listeners and consumers still looking to get their Radiohead on in 2006 can turn, instead, to front man/mad genius/elf Thom Yorke's newly released album "The Eraser."
By working in a heavily electronic vein, Yorke sets himself up well to have cantaloupe-sized accusations of pretentiousness lobbed at him. But while "The Eraser" sometimes gives in to blurts and bleats that might as well be coming from a broken Atari, it's not like Yorke tried to craft some sort of electronic opus. It is nothing more than a solid album of restrained experimentation.
The arrangements, credited to Yorke and producer Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Beck, Travis), are minimal and hypnotic, with beats strong enough to induce head-spinning, but not enough to be truly memorable. Nonetheless, the nervous bassline on "Harrowdown Hill" is itching to be found by the DJ who will remix it into a club hit.
Yorke's vocals take on a cyclical style as well, creating refrains out of three or four words repeated over and over and over again.
"The Eraser" is a chance for Yorke to explore and expand on the electronic textures of the last three Radiohead studio albums, but all too often this means leaning on sounds already used on those albums.
But when the computerized layers of "The Eraser" are peeled away, they reveal the very human voice at the very center of it all. Yorke has earned a reputation for being a mope, and while "The Eraser" won't do much to dispel that reputation, it does contain some of his warmest compositions to date.
