![]() ![]() ![]() A Light for Attracting Attention, their debut studio album, thrives on physicality and dizzying band interplay, particularly in songs like “The Smoke” - which juggles sultry grooves and technical playing and comes out sounding a little like “Talk Show Host” but a little more like Beefheart - or the rowdy “You Will Never Work in Television Again,” on which Yorke razzes Silvio Berlusconi with all the piss and vinegar of The Bends’s “Just.” The jitteriness of “We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings” was the feeling of being alive in 2022 distilled into song. Forming a trio with longtime bandmate Jonny Greenwood and the London jazz drummer Tom Skinner seems to have nudged Yorke back into an older, harsher version of himself. In Radiohead, he pivots from heady art rock to chilly atmospherics to baroque acoustics in his solo projects, he does dance music but also foreboding drones. The Smile, A Light for Attracting AttentionĮvery time Thom Yorke lands on a signature sound, he smashes it to bits. “We Wants Revenge” extends the tradition to the generation of listeners shaken into an early awareness of world politics as schoolchildren watching 9/11 unfold on TV: “I want my motherfucking childhood back.” This could be morose, heady stuff, but Soul Glo makes it feel like a lively bar debate, a series of short blasts of no-nonsense invective delivered colorfully in the way that some of the best punk rock in history has transmuted political science into everyman rage. Singer Pierce Jordan makes the differences between the genres seem negligible, shrieking in a rapper’s cadence about the problems people of color face in modern America and the inertia and disinterest in radical change that stoke division and wealth inequality. Dive in deeper and you find Soul Glo melding the tunefulness of its earliest songs with the jarring balance of noise, punk, and the odd hip-hop track heard across 2019’s The Nigga in Me Is Me. ![]() The bong rip and the “Can I live?” at the top of “Gold Chain Punk (whogonbeatmyass?),” the first song on Philadelphia punk trio Soul Glo’s latest album, Diaspora Problems, are your first clues that the sound of this band is changing. ![]()
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