Time Is Kind Of Frozen

The Smile “Bending Hectic”

Two big musical swerves happen in the final third of “Bending Hectic.” The first is the arrival of a screeching atonal string section, something you’d expect from Jonny Greenwood in the years since he transitioned into becoming one of the most in-demand film score composers. (In fact, it sounds a lot like what he did for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.) The second is a burst of heavy grunge guitar, which along with thudding drums and soaring Thom Yorke vocals provides a genuine catharsis for a song that is mostly so delicate and minimal that it sounds as though it could get blown away with a slight breeze. That second part is a wild curveball for Greenwood and Yorke, who I think most anyone would have reasonably assumed were done with this sort of sound sometime during the first Clinton administration. But maybe the feel free to do this sort of thing without the baggage of being called Radiohead, or maybe this is a mode they just wanted to try out with Tom Skinner on drums. But really this is just a logical place for this song to go, a storm following all that eerie stillness.

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