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Nov 26, 2014 Thom Yorke By Mack Hayden

Thom Yorke is at the point in his career where anything he does is going to be viewed with the importance of a revelation from Mount Sinai. Thankfully, he’s no charlatan and his musical messages usually bring more chaos and clarity into the lives of his listeners than most could ever hope to. But Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes enters his apocrypha more easily than his canon. It’s not worth comparing to his output with Radiohead, considering even the frontman himself can’t top his main band’s brilliance, but seeing where it stacks up compared to The Eraser and Atoms for Peace’s AMOK is definitely a useful pastime.

To make a long story short: it’s the middle ground between the former’s quiet genius and the latter’s unfortunate faltering as a supergroup that wasn’t that super after all. Yorke works best with Radiohead, but with two solo albums released now, what he gets up to on his own is going to fill you up fine. Where AMOK screwed up was its inability to decide where exactly the songs were supposed to hit and run. Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes is similar to The Eraser in its electronic aesthetic; it’s cohesive but hardly the most compelling album he’s released.

The main thing the blips and beats of this record will probably do for you is get you excited for what Radiohead’s cooking up in the studio right now. Whether with their The King of Limbs or Yorke’s two most recent side projects (AMOK and, now, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes), guitars are only there to add additional sightseeing to the clipped-out calculation of computerized instrumentation. Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes is a lighthouse on the horizon insofar as it may be a signal this is all Yorke wants to do now, or his next album with Radiohead will be something new entirely. (www.radiohead.co.uk)

Author rating: 5/10