The Sampler: The Smile, Ibeyi, Silas Futura

Tony Stamp reviews the Radiohead side-project The Smile, an album about The Egyptian Book of the Dead by Afro-Cuban/ French sisters Ibeyi, and a pair of loose, experimental EPs from Tāmaki R&B musician Silas Futura.

A Light for Attracting Attention by The Smile

Looking at their last few decades of output, you could be forgiven for thinking Thom Yorke doesn’t like being in Radiohead much. In the last ten years, he’s put out two solo albums, a soundtrack, and a record with his band Atoms For Peace, and during that same period, Radiohead released one.

Meanwhile, Johnny Greenwood has become an acclaimed composer for film, netting Oscar noms for his Phantom Thread and Power of the Dog scores.

The two have joined forces with drummer Tom Skinner to form a new band: The Smile. Their album A Light For Attracting Attention is easily the most ‘Radiohead’ sounding of any band member’s previous side projects and features some of Yorke and Greenwood’s best songs. What differences there are revolve around Skinner’s busy playing and a certain off-the-cuff energy that’s been missing from Radiohead albums for some time.

After the deafening acclaim given to their third album OK Computer, the weight of expectation nearly broke the band, and the resulting album Kid A sported a complete change of aesthetic as a result. Every full-length since then has felt like an event, and they’ve sounded, by and large, thoroughly pristine, buffed and polished by regular producer Nigel Godrich.

He’s back on this album, providing the usual reservoirs of reverb. But the playing is loose and off the cuff. Yorke and Greenwood feel unburdened. The album draws on their regular inspirations: krautrock, jazz, and the kind of systems music pioneered by the likes of Steve Reich. The pair’s great skill has always been to fold these disparate influences into palatable art-rock songs.

Tom Skinner’s day job is playing drums for Sons of Kemet, a British jazz outfit. This is the first Yorke release in a long while to not feature a hyperactive drum machine, and I assume he liked Skinner’s ability to approximate one. His drumming is always interesting, whether he’s matching Greenwood’s fret blazing on some of the twitchier rock tracks, or holding down the groove on ‘The Smoke’, a soul/funk workout supplemented with Yorke’s choir boy falsetto. 

That track is a good example of Greenwood smuggling in his luxurious brass arrangements, subtly layering them in as he does elsewhere with strings. Of the songs that could be termed ‘rock’, I think my favourite is ‘We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings’, maybe because it eschews odd time signatures and intervals for something more straightforward; gothic and synthy, with a classic bit of vaguely political Yorke sloganeering.

Synths aside, A Light For Attracting Attention is mostly free of electronics, and always sounds like three people playing together. The guitar atmospheres of Ed O’Brien are notably absent, but otherwise, this is indistinguishable from a looser, more urgent Radiohead.

For a while, there Thom Yorke tried to obscure his voice’s natural beauty, and it’s been nice hearing him embrace it again in recent years. The ballads on this album are as emotive as anything Radiohead has ever done, like the instantly engaging chords of ‘Open the Floodgates’, with Yorke smothered in reverb like he’s at the bottom of a cave. 

It’s the ballads that really get me, but I appreciate that Yorke and Greenwood surround them with more challenging songs. Radiohead always distinguished themselves by staying barbed and staving off boredom in the process. 

There’s one track here, called ‘Free In The Knowledge’, which sounds like something Thom Yorke might have written circa 1995’s The Bends. But it’s paired with a string arrangement that’s very modern Johnny Greenwood. The two things together illustrate why this is such an important creative partnership. I think it’s one of the best songs they’ve ever made.

Spell 31 by Ibeyi

Lisa-Kaindé Diaz and Naomi Diaz come from musical lineage: their dad Anga was a Grammy-winning percussionist, who wound up part of the Buena Vista Social Club ensemble, and their mum Maya is a singer, and now their manager.

Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi make music as Ibeyi, and family is a big part of their musical story: They’re twins, and previous albums paid tribute to their deceased older sister Yanira. On their third album Spell 31 they reach back further, drawing inspiration from their ancestors, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

The twins are Afro-French Cuban, born in Havana but raised in Paris. During the sessions for this album, they discussed their family history and the knowledge lost to colonisation. As it happened, a copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead was in the studio, and they found a passage describing magic as something handed down in an unbroken line. The idea of this connection to their ancestors inspired them, so they named the album after the incantation: Spell 31.

It’s a good blurb for an album, if a bit too neat. But that mystical backstory gives a solid frame to hang these songs on, and Ibeyi are sincere and wholehearted.

The beat in ‘Made of Gold’ is compelling enough, and it's joined by their intertwining voices before they hit on the ‘made of gold’ refrain, an example of them plucking an earworm out of nowhere. It ends with one sister reading Spell 31 from The Book of the Dead.

Family is evoked more deliberately on ‘Sister 2 Sister’, which cheekily tells the listener how to pronounce Ibeyi, and celebrates their connection with lyrics about singing along to Shakira, and crying on each other, with multilayered backing chants giving it an almost mythic feel.

The biggest left turn here is a cover of ‘Rise Above’, by Californian punk band Black Flag. The Diaz sisters claim to have not heard the original version to this day. Richard Russell, who owns XL Recordings, and produced this album, hand wrote the lyrics to the song and showed Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi, and they were inspired to make their version, underlining its theme of communal uprising with more richly layered vocals.

For this album, Ibeyi changed their working habits, with Naomi and Richard Russell making rhythms first, and Lisa-Kaindé writing songs to fit them. It’s resulted in an album with a steady rhythmic pulse that reinforces the defiant vibe. Throughout the Diaz sisters evoke their ancestry and draw strength from it - even its mellowest song fits that idea into its title, ‘Tears Are Our Medicine’.

Rā/ Pō by Silas Futura

Listening back to Pluto, the first EP by Tāmaki musician Silas Futura, I’m still taken with how jubilant it is, full of tracks that foster positivity, in a slick musical package.

He’s just released a pair of follow-ups that to my ears take a slightly different tack. If Pluto was about polish and triumph, Rā and Pō seem to be saying ‘just do your best’. Musically speaking, letting go of perfection can often yield more interesting results.

There’s a lyric in Rā track ‘Hopes’ that says "I’m afraid to get my hopes up these days", summing up a certain type of pandemic-era listlessness. But it’s the line "I can’t kick this feeling that I’mma be ok" that sums up the defeated optimism of this EP.

In the age of social media, when no one will ever fess up to being wrong or misinformed, it’s downright shocking to hear Silas Futura admit to changing his mind five times a day. But that’s what the song ‘Coasting’ is about: keeping things cool by admitting fallibility. 

There’s a very Aotearoa vibe running through that one - in its twinkling keys, and Silas Futura’s accent and attitude, trailing off to adlib throughout. The idea that surviving Auckland is hard enough, so let’s not fight, is a very relatable one.

And ‘coasting’ sums up this pair of EP's approach. They’re content throughout, and on Pō, feature some of Futura’s most experimental work, with the same ‘hey, why not?’ spirit. If Rā is about getting through the day, on Pō it’s nightfall, so let’s get a bit weird. 

Here Futura lets his guard down even more, recording his voice through his laptop mic and letting it be submerged into the music, as on the churning ‘To Stay For A While’ and its fluttering soundscape.

‘R U Lying’ goes even deeper; brittle and sterile, but full of feeling.

Silas Futura described the songs on Pō as "digital as it gets", but went on to say it’s the closest he’s come to capturing "pure emotion" on tape. You can imagine these tracks being tinkered with for a few years and emerging as pop bangers, so it’s admirable he released them in these experimental forms.

Rā and Pō champion just surviving as something to be proud of, and that generous approach extends to trying new things and taking the listener to places they haven’t heard before. If that’s where coasting gets you, then it’s to be commended.