It’s a good thing “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes,” the surprise solo album Thom Yorke released last week through BitTorrent, won’t be sold in stores. After all, music retailers don’t stock a “difficult listening” section.
Available to download for $6, the eight-track “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes” has moments of vividness and a few toe-tapping grooves. Mostly, though, Yorke’s solo follow-up to 2006’s “The Eraser” is a slog. Listening to it feels like work, delivering pretty much what you expect when the Radiohead singer and long-time producer Nigel Godrich (also a member of Atoms for Peace with Yorke) go it alone. The album’s heavily distorted and digitally mashed bytes and bits sound like a vinyl record put through the dishwasher and played on a turntable with a bad needle. Of course, most of the echoing vocals focus on Yorke’s paranoid pontificating about the modern world and the technological dangers that come with it.
That’s not to say the album doesn’t have its moments. Though opening track “A Brain in a Bottle” is a yawn-worthy, predictable Yorke tune, it leads into “Guess Again!” which pairs a haunting set of piano chords with some head-bobbing, bass-throbbing beats and lyrics that hearken back to Radiohead’s “Amnesiac” era. Later on the record, “Truth Ray” provides a pleasantly trippy, subdued break from the droning monotony, even with its ominous lyrics about sin and losing everything.
Still, Yorke’s solo effort should be a challenge for even his most diehard fans to digest. Those supporters will be left half-satisfied, hoping “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes'” got all the bleeps and bloops out of Yorke’s system before recording Radiohead’s next album. Speaking of which: Yorke didn’t “pull a Beyonce” here. Radiohead was tweaking album release conventions years before Blue Ivy was even born.
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