Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke – Tall Tales – clashmusic.com

Thom Yorke’s projects tend to share things in common: they’re distinctly “Thom Yorke” and at the same time entirely outside of the realms of expectation. Meanwhile, Mark Pritchard remains prolific but generally under the radar, contributing essential elements of sound and style to many and varied projects while rarely taking the limelight.
The result of Yorke and Pritchard teaming up again (the electronic artist contributed two remixes of Radiohead’s ‘Bloom’ to a 2011 collection, and worked with Yorke on the song ‘Beautiful People’ in 2016) is ‘Tall Tales’: a sometimes otherworldly, frequently tongue-in-cheek, and occasionally surprisingly punchy album. It’s a distinctive part of the Yorke canon which also stands apart as a musical reference-point marking the convergence of two creative minds.
‘A Fake In A Faker’s World’ brings a muted start to the record, a pulsating synth beat entering our conscious world soon to be joined by floating, filtered vocals from Yorke. As those vocals repeat and drift, musing on the uncertainty of this reality in which we find ourselves, the track settles in for the long haul, washing in and out with a sense of unhurried rhythm, a tidal rise and fall. An eight-minute 19-second opening track is an audacious start, marking this album out very much as a creative exercise rather than a crowd-pleaser. 
‘Ice Shelf’ feels like an ominous, chilling flight over a barely visible landscape, Yorke’s vocal again heavily processed, dreamlike, slurring, with no rhythm to support it until the closing minute. That rhythm serves only to distribute rather than reassure — this track is an accompaniment to heavy thoughts. Which makes the otherwise ethereal ‘Bugging Out Again’ feel almost melodic in context. There’s a theme to Yorke’s vocal line here, and Pritchard’s rich and many-layered sounds built around and beneath his collaborator’s voice are beginning to form into something more comprehensible. The formless void is being tamed, the darkness is beginning to understand that there may be another side. 
In ‘Back in the Game’, the vision is realised, briefly and triumphantly: from the dark emerges a recognisable pulse of electronic sound, fighting free from a cloak of discordance. Yorke is unleashed here, his voice more audibly his own, mature and declamatory.
Then, in ‘The White Cliffs’, energy levels drop subtly again, while at the same time Yorke exercises his purest vocal tones for the first time, using a falsetto rarely heard recently. It feels refreshing, a chance to kick back. Yorke’s voice floats above a synth-chorus line, before the instrumentation begins to build further and, later, those vocals enter a lower register. ‘The White Cliffs’ is perhaps the most perfectly formed offering on the album, as the length of this track (spookily identical to the opening one) allows for many phases; Pritchard makes the most of the open field offered him, and the effect is an easy and uncontrived flow of creativity. There are of course shades of many a Radiohead tune in this track (I’ve tried to resist mentioning that band excessively, but — probably due to their expansive output over previous decades as well as Yorke’s integral role — comparisons are unavoidable).
“Everything is out of our hands now” is a key message of the song. This should be reassuring, and in a way, it is; but it’s the cold reassurance that follows moments of fear.
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‘The Spirit’ offer a thinner sound but more clarity for Yorke. He seems to have emerged slowly as the album has developed. Here, his vocals are crisp with a chill-edged production, and this provides a neat and smooth transition into the electronic bleepings of ‘Gangsters’, a quirkier number which sounds like the musings of a digital mind, a mind that ultimately wins out. Perhaps this is Yorke’s android-dreaming come to a sort of fruition.
‘This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice’ offers reprieve and another more coherent tune for Yorke to get on top of; it’s a song imbued with a human personality. “I’m not your problem to be corrected / How can you function with a mind ejected…”
The title track, ‘Tall Tales’, sees an abrupt plunge back into apparent darkness, an expertly sequenced, haunting, waking dream saturated with snatches of warped conversation. It’s here, as you listen more closely, that you begin to wonder how seriously we should be taking all this. 
“There were these two clowns / Double scoops for everyone / Not me…”
It’s undoubtedly unsettling, but to what end? 
‘Happy Days’ doesn’t clarify things. It’s built on a faux-chirpy marching beat, with lightly bouncing vocals. Further into the song, a bassoon seals the deal. It’s the kind of music which challenges you – dares you – to have fun with it.
“Drowning in the deep blue sea…” sings Yorke, and then, “Happy days, happy days, death and taxes”. There’s undeniably more than one level of message here: you can have fun listening for sure, but whether you take away more than that comes down to your present state of mind. Are we witnessing Yorke, enabled by Pritchard, exercising a wry sense of humour here, joining with us to take satirical jabs at the world in general? Or are they laughing at us as we engage our all-too pliable emotions?
‘The Men Who Dance in Stag’s Heads’ is a gravelly, careful, introspective song; an obscure, observational lullaby, rich with orchestral support. Led by that more soothing approach, which contrasts nicely with the preceding track, we’re led into the album’s final offering: ‘Wandering Genie’. Here, “I am falling” is the inescapable line, repeated to great effect.
The impression as the song fades is of having been through a gentle but relentless pummelling; the album has been a perceptive and nersistent rollercoaster. a child’s fairground ride warped into something which reflects rarely talked-about inner fears. This is not a record which will soothe your anxieties; in fact, it might trigger some you hadn’t known about, such is the accuracy of Pritchard’s composition and production, and his ability to meld with Yorke’s unmistakable vocal approach. ‘Tall Tales’ may well lead you to understand more of yourself. Conversely, you may come away more confused than ever.
Whichever it is, I sense Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke will be happy with a job well done.
8/10
Words: Phil Taylor
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