It’s been a good week for Radiohead fans, who certainly are losing it now over the imminent release of the band's first album in five years. Two singles have been released already, “Daydreaming” and “Burn the Witch.” The latter in particular, with its repeated col legno cello accompaniment, sounds distinctive from anything Radiohead has released before—but, as always, it’s driven by the band’s most familiar constant: Thom Yorke's voice.
In the world of popular music, there are voices and then there are voices. Thom Yorke's is of the latter category. His falsetto is capable of shifting from an elegant (and/or semi-incomprehensible) warble to caterwaul on a dime. Like a J Mascis guitar fill, Yorke’s voice is so clearly his from the moment you hear it. He knows how to render his voice an instrument of its own, a weapon to overpower a song in either the best or the worst way.
With a voice so unmistakable, it’s probably for the best that Yorke has been selective about putting it to work outside of Radiohead, his supergroup Atoms for Peace, and his two solo albums (2006’s The Eraser and 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes). But when he has, his contributions on other people’s records often have managed to outshine the tracks they sat alongside.
It hasn’t always been that way, though. Like Radiohead’s own path, Yorke’s voice took a few years to mutate from Semi-Interesting Alt-Rocker to Left-Field Art-Rock Demigod to Electronic Grand Wizard. For this reason, both the styles and quality of Yorke’s guest vocal contributions can be more or less broken down into two distinct and separate eras of pre-Kid A (i.e. 2000 and earlier) and post Kid-A; the former category is comprised of essentially standard rock performances, while the latter sees Yorke transition into a type of muse for the biggest names in electronic music.
As we await the new Radiohead album, let’s trace the full history of Yorke’s non-Radiohead/non-solo/non-Atoms for Peace vocal collaborations.
Pre-Kid A Pop Work
Curiously, Yorke’s very first guest appearance outside of Radiohead was providing (very faint) backing vocals on this limp n’ languid Sparklehorse cover of the classic Pink Floyd song. It’s probably also the last time we’ll ever hear Yorke on a Floyd tune, as the band spent much of the late 1990s dodging negative wannabe comparisons to that band from folks like Robert Christgau, who said, “Radiohead wouldn't know a tragic hero if they were cramming for their A levels, and their idea of soul is Bono.”
“El President” is therefore Yorke’s first proper contributing guest appearance, on a release by an otherwise forgotten mid-’90s pop band. Unlike the previous track, Yorke’s traded off verses with Drugstore’s lead singer Isabel Monteiro here are deep-sung, bright and bold, though in the softer, mopier mold of The Bends rather the more detached OK Computer style he’d just debuted that year. Unfortunately, the song itself is weak and sounds dated, akin to a diet Throwing Muses--which possibly explains why it might be the least known track on this list.
These three Roxy Music covers were recorded for the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack, with a studio band made up of Yorke, his Radiohead bandmate Jonny Greenwood, Roxy’s Andy Mackay, and Suede’s Bernard Butler. Yorke’s selection as Mock Bryan Ferry—another vocalist with distinctive style of croon—is intriguing, but unfortunately each of these three covers are as straight-faced as possible. The band is so perfectly on point that Yorke weirdly comes off as the weak link, as an understated singer who doesn’t sound enough like either Bryan Ferry or Thom Yorke.
These three all come from a collaboration with Harvey on her sixth album Stories From the City, Stories From The Sea. It’s clear that the time spent over the previous three years ruling the world seems to have paid off for Yorke, as you can hear an increased confidence in his delivery. “One Line” features Yorke utilizing a wordless croon as backing instrument to the song—he’s still channeling Bono, but the tone has begun to shift to “ghostly” instead of “emotive.” “Beautiful Feeling,” which features only Harvey on guitar, is more impressive, as Yorke’s multi-tracked backing moans stand out more prominently and make the song feel like a true collaboration between the two. “This Mess We’re In” is a nice call-and-response duet between the two of them that showcases the best of each; Yorke’s part recalls Radiohead’s “Talk Show Host.”
This tune, from Björk’s Dancer in the Dark soundtrack Selmasongs, is the first of Yorke’s two collaborations with Björk, coming out one month before Kid A dropped and the world’s past understanding of Radiohead disappeared completely. It’s ironic (and a little disappointing) given the direction the band’s music went that Yorke partners with Björk here on a simplistic showtune rather than the more adventurous electronic fare she’s mastered. Yorke’s lines are delivered in an “eh” speak-sing and don’t give him much of an opportunity to stretch out, feeling last a wasted opportunity.
The Turning Point
I’m cheating a bit by placing this one out of chronological order, but in a way, Yorke’s work on this incredible UNKLE track served as an inspirational turning point for his career. For the first time, the Yorke Vox Brand was removed from the context of “rock band singer” and placed in a framework of experimental electronic music—and in particular, in the attentive hands of a still-on point DJ Shadow—and the results are enough to induce chills. The way that Yorke just lets it riiiiiiiiiiiiip in the last 90 seconds is perfect and clearly a flashpoint for many *Kid A *vocals. “Rabbit In Your Headlights” was so good that it left a legion of fans craving an entire album of future Yorke/Shadow collaborations.
Post-Kid A Electronic Experiments
A near seven-year gap follows between Yorke’s work with Harvey and the release of this track with Modeselektor. In between, everything changed for him: Radiohead traded in their guitars for synths (and back again), and Yorke began branching out as a solo artist to create even more experimental and electronic-oriented work. And here now, it all starts coming together: His vocals on “White Flash” work so perfectly that it feels like this is his band. While similar in some respects to the tracks on the previous year’s Yorke solo effort The Eraser, there’s a Kompakt-label bounce that keeps “White Flash” distinct.
On this second collaboration with Björk, Yorke’s contribution to this non-album single is significantly more subtle, with swirling atmospheric backing vocals that are so processed that you wouldn’t even know it was him. The track is interesting, but it’s Björk’s show and Thom’s participation barely qualifies as wallpaper.
This one might come a close second to “Rabbit in Your Headlights” as the best non-Radiohead cut Yorke has recorded, and would sound perfectly at home on one of Yorke’s solo records. Also, in a similar fashion to that UNKLE song, Yorke’s bleating vocals are such a smashing fit with the claustrophobic third-gen IDM of Flying Lotus, it’s enough to make you wonder why the latter would record anything else again without him.
This supergroup turns out to be less than the sum of its parts. On “Ego,” the Burial dub-shuffle and warbly vocal samples dominate, and it feels pretty literally like “poorly recorded Thom Yorke vox on top of a Burial beat” in a way that works but is nothing to write home about. “Mirror” is stronger, with slightly more emphatic vocals from Yorke that offer more urgency, better utilizing them as an instrument of their own.
Taking the success of ‘07’s “White Flash” and ratcheting it up a level, “This” and its front-and-center wall of echoed Yorke vocals hit you immediately—and hard. And “Shipwreck,” with its galloping BPM-up’ed drum beat similar to In Rainbows lead “15 Steps” is even better—it’s the most fun non-Radiohead track Yorke has participated in yet. While “White Flash” felt more like a “microhouse Thom Yorke track”, “This” and “Shipwreck” sound much more like unclassifiable experimental electronic jams. Hearing these three collaborations, it’s easy to imagine to how and why these two artists could go off and produce an entire album together a la Super Collider or Von Sudenfed, and certainly should make Yorke fans yearn for such a gift to come to fruition.
After the universally-lauded success of “And the World Laughs,” the band got back together again for another go to see if they could recapture that lightning in a bottle for Flying Lotus’ Until The Quiet Comes. “Electric Candyman” follows suit with the rest of the album in slowing to a downtempo jazz feel, and Yorke’s hazy and stretched-out vocals turn the track into a more stoned version of something off the first or second Massive Attack record. Not as impressive as its predecessor, but still noteworthy.
Finally, four years later, we now have the latest Yorke collaboration, out next week on Mark Pritchard’s excellent new record. Yorke’s appearance here is a bit of a return-the-favor after Pritchard contributed two takes to Radiohead’s TKOL remix album, but what the two do together here far outstrips either *TKOL *tracks. Set over a Boards of Canada-esque backdrop of pastoralia, Yorke’s heavily processed vocals create a sense of lonely yearning on here to match the best moments of King of Limbs.
