Warped fairy tales for these strange days: Pritchard and Yorke's album

In 1991, English literature and fine arts graduate Thom Yorke was dabbling in DJing at Exeter's Lemon Grove, discovering early hits on a Sheffield label called Warp. He would complete that catalogue of music at the end of the decade, when Radiohead would be partly influenced by it for their sonic breakthrough with 'Kid A'. The circle came full circle a quarter of a century after that first breakthrough, when Yorke released his first record for Warp, a collaboration with Mark Pritchard, one of the label's leading names. They are joined by Jonathan Zawada, a visual artist who has curated a full-length developed in tandem with the evolution of the music.

'Tall Tales' was born at a distance and in the midst of a pandemic. After Pritchard's remix of the Radiohead track 'Bloom' in 2011 and a collaboration on 'Beautiful People' for the producer's 2016 album 'Under the Sun', Yorke emailed Pritchard to ask if he had any new material to work on, thus beginning a long-distance collaboration between Oxfordshire and Australia. The synthesisers that Pritchard has been unearthing for years in flea markets halfway around the world, Yorke's vocal distortions, drum machines playing hide and seek have resulted in an album inspired by the power of fairy tales, how they mark our imaginations since childhood. Above all, to how fairy tales hide a monstrous side that describes our present well.

The album opens in didactic fashion with 'A Fake in a Faker's World', a long dystopia haunted by sonic mirages that turns into an experimental suite. "Ice Shelf" is as evanescent as "Back in the Game" resonates, and in between, a silvery melancholy gushes from the subdued "Bugging Out Again". In the minimal marchette "The White Cliffs", Yorke's voice sounds like never before and expresses its full potential in the bright "The Spirit", to be heavily distorted in the Kraftwerk echo of "Gangsters". In "This Conversation is Missing Your Voice", techno clashes with neo soul, while the album's title track is a more layered and crowded, but equally unsettling "Fitter Happier" 2.0. If "Happy Days" is a warped vaudeville, "The Men Who Dance in Stag's Heads" an "Atmosphere" inspired by Benjamin Myers' novel "The Gallows Pole".

The curtain falls on 'Wandering Genie', which floats on a puddle reflecting a sky that has survived a terrible storm. Yet, the song has only one verse, "I am falling" layered in a cascade of voices. We arrive at these three words after crossing the grotesque figures conceived by Zawada, years in which we witness the continuous declination of the term crisis in all possible contexts: political, economic, social, relational, humanitarian. "Tall Tales" is music from a future past, an "esperpento", as Valle-Inclán would say. It might sound like an escape route, but it is instead a fascinating, deformed mirror of our present.