The Smile
3Arena
★★★★★
How do we find transcendence in a world that seems to conspire against it? This is a question that emerges while watching Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner. Before they take to the stage, James Holden brings us into nourishing terrain, fully embodying the title of his record of last year-Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities, perfectly prefacing The Smile’s show, creating cross-currents and sympathetic scaffolding from psychedelia to trance.
This scaffolding is something that The Smile have evolved over the last while, deftly and rigorously, producing 2022′s A Light for Attracting Attention and this year’s Wall of Eyes, harnessing a sense of unfettered creative freedom, refusing past histories. Read the Room sets the tone with its swirling bassline that chases and frets its hour upon the stage, met downstream by the pared-back Wall of Eyes and, like many of The Smile’s compositions, it is richly layered, as is Tom Skinner’s drumming, which dominates The Opposite, a snarling piece of work, where Yorke sings of “logical absurdity”.
Logical absurdity is a recurrent theme, found in some of the wonky time signatures, in Yorke apologising on behalf of his country for Brexit, or Greenwood playing the guitar like a cello, and in their collective sense that no song is really finite, but part of a continuous stream, with any other approach seeming risible. This constant recalibrating is part of the majesty, along with their folding in of new work, such as Instant Psalm with its old-fashioned grace or the insanely groovy Zero Sum.
The contributions of Robert Stillman on saxophone and synths bring another compelling complexion to their endeavour, the “altered state” Yorke refers to in the wry Friend of a Friend, and Yorke’s voice has never sounded better; always a mysterious, beautiful instrument, it reveals a tattered delicacy on Speech Bubbles and silky strangeness on Skrting on the Surface.
There are many mirrorings; themes and tones that swoop back and forth, creating an intimate sonic tapestry, from the guitars on Thin Thing and Under Our Pillows, to the frantic nature of You Will Never Work in Television Again and We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings, to the heavier musical palette on Bending Hectic and the weightiness of The Smoke.
When we meet Teleharmonic at the encore it resembles a kind of prayer, distilling much of The Smile’s perspective – we are “caught in dragnets”, but it is a wildly sensual world, it is the “eyes open wide” of the eerie Pana-Vision and its beautiful piano. This is vital, intelligent, loving music, providing a question mark rather than an exclamation, sharing more in common with the astral travelling of Pharaoh Sanders or Alice Coltrane, a world where swaggering beats easily sit beside celestial saxophone, and spectres of the baroque dance around dub.
There is such synchronicity between the players that it seems clear that no two shows will be the same, an enlivening idea, and The Smile are fully tilted towards something Mark Twain wrote of in 1906, “a great and refining and uplifting benefaction to this sordid and money-mad age”.
