It's always fascinating to read into solo albums something about the way a musical collective functions.
Take Radiohead, for instance: given guitarist Jonny Greenwood's challenging film soundtrack work, can we conclude that it's him rather than Thom Yorke who pushes the band into the more extreme sonic territory it sometimes occupies? And whatever the cause, does drummer Philip Selway offer a corrective to that tendency, a tugging back towards the pop and rock mainstream?
On the basis of these two solo albums - one scheduled and released in the normal manner, the other unannounced and available only as a paid-for download from file-sharing protocol BitTorrent - the answer to those questions are "No" and "Yes".
Recorded in Radiohead's Oxfordshire studio, Selway's second solo effort finds him in familiar surroundings but with unfamiliar bandmates. They are Katherine Mann, aka Quinta, and Adem Ilhan. As a result, the slightly po-faced fixidity of purpose which characterises a Radiohead album is replaced by a sense of exploration and playfulness. That's good.
In a way, though, Weatherhouse suffers from having been built in such a pressure-free environment: It'll End In Tears is pleasantly Beatles-y, even building to a big Hey
Jude-style chorus, but Selway's hazy vocals, workaday lyrics and unadventurous melodies give much of the rest of the set a "so what?" feel.
There's nothing Beatles-y about Yorke's uncompromising offering. Still apparently obsessed with electronica, if not to the boundary-pushing extent of acts like Aphex Twin or Autechre, Tomorrow's Modern Boxes borrows dubstep's wobbly bass and skittering drum rhythms and bolts on various other influences.
On opener A Brain In A Bottle it's dub; on The Mother Lode, probably the album's prettiest track, it's an insistent piano pulse over which Yorke adds vocals which sound almost soulful; on mournfully downbeat closer Nose Grows Some it's what sounds like static - though being a BitTorrent newbie, that may be the result of a downloading gaffe on my part.
Still, taken together these albums augur well for the new Radiohead album rumoured to be already underway.
Barry Didcock
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