Tall Tales fails to live up to its potential

Grade: B+

You are in the wrong hands here for what is a homage to this duo’s favorite electronic music. The only Radiohead album I like is the guitar-driven Pablo Honey (and I wasn’t terribly mad on that to be honest). My inclination is to mark down the genre itself, for its wafting and beeping and farting portentousness, all the way back to Stockhausen. But I suppose one has to put such prejudices aside.

What we have is Yorke’s anguished, puppy-dog falsetto, occasionally tenor and on one song contralto, with Pritchard’s sweeping aural soundscapes and clever but often annoying rhythms. At times the repetitiveness made me cry with boredom, but I do understand that repetitiveness is part of the shtick. There are several moments when it all works rather beautifully, such as with the very pretty “The White Cliffs,” or the playful, Tangerine Dream-ish “Gangsters.” Only on these and “The Spirit,” though, do you get a sense of what this album could have been if indulgence had been shelved for a brief while and such disdained bourgeois interlopers as tonal melody allowed into the party.

Elsewhere, Yorke provides a number of seven-note refrains, repeated over and over. Couldn’t you, once in a while, Thom, stretch to eight notes? Never mind. There is just about enough beauty in the album’s middle section to convince you that music can seduce as cannily as it sedates, that we do not need the electronic evocation of cathedrals or glaciers to convince us that the music we are listening to has a grandeur. Which is what, I would guess, these two talented souls were looking for.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.