Radiohead began taking longer and longer gaps between albums over the years (But there’s still hope that they’ll do another album together), but with The Smile, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood are already more prolific than Radiohead have been in years, if not ever. “Cutouts” is their third album in a two-and-a-half year span, and their second released this year. And as “Kid A/Amnesiac” fans know, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood releasing two albums in close succession does not mean that one is leftovers.
If anything, this follow up to January’s acclaimed “Wall of Eyes” might be even better than its predecessor. It’s at least more accessible; it harnesses some of the same psychedelia that fuelled “Wall of Eyes” (particularly on the hallucinogenic “Colours Fly”), but it’s less jammy and freeform. It veers closer to the tight, futuristic art rock of 2000s-era Radiohead, with Thom’s ever-angelic voice supported by a bed of stabbing guitar riffs, buzzing synths, sweeping string arrangements from the London Contemporary Orchestra, and the heart-pounding rhythms of drummer Tom Skinner.
These songs are some of the strongest that Thom and Jonny have written together in recent memory, and they scratch so many different types of Radiohead-esque itches, from the chaos of “Zero Sum” to the gentle acoustics of “Instant Psalm” to the paranoid pop of “Don’t Get Me Started.”
It can be easy to start to take brilliant, lifer songwriters like Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood for granted, especially when they give you two albums in the same year, but a great album like “Cutouts” is as good a reminder as any to never do that.
The Fat Angel Sings 