Thom Yorke - Harrowdown Hill (XL)
4/5
By: Charlie Potter
'Harrowdown Hill' begins with a few seconds of a solitary crusty bass line, the sound almost exactly the sort you would get on an old punk record, and it's easily the most surprising thing about it. There's an almost jolly sounding melody until the third bar when the drum machine and the soft background synth sound come in, and all of a sudden the track sounds especially sinister, Thom singing politically charged musings like 'don't walk the plank like I did, you'll be dispensed with...' (the track's theme is the suicide of Dr. David Kelly at the time of the Hutton Report into the government's dubious reasons offered for the Iraq war).
The drum sounds here are incredible, every sound meticulously panned and mixed, and truly some of producer Nigel Godrich's best work to date. It's a very simple song in a lot of ways, the melodies comprising of a couple of straightforward three note bass lines and a few long synth drones. If one were to listen to this without the vocals, it would most probably be tedious. But that's OK. He does sing. Still, it would be nice to hear him do something with some really off beat, glitched up electronica in the background.
That the track will probably snare you within the second or third listen is largely to do with the pacing and its cunning simplicity. In fact, now this review's finished, I think I might go and listen to it again...
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