Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard first crossed paths in 2012, after Radiohead, on a night off tour in Sydney, turned up to the dextrous producer’s festival set. The two of them chatted over dinner in a meeting that Pritchard, perhaps surprisingly, portrays as a perfectly casual affair. On the right is an inscrutable titan of art-rock, presumably shooting daggers around the room while cryptically eating a salad. On the left is the bespectacled interloper with more production aliases than anyone can count, propounding a hare-brained scheme to get together and rustle up some tunes.
But travelers of the dance underground represented mythic figures to Yorke. By 2012, he was already several years into a self-imposed life sentence of atonement for his part in some of the greatest rock music ever made. Cult concerns like Link and Reload—Pritchard’s sprawling constellation in the extended Warp universe—had long ago bewitched the singer, a man who still seems personally affronted that Radiohead are more popular than LFO. So “yeah, yeah,” Yorke told him. “Just send me whatever you want.”
Nearly a decade later they started work on Tall Tales. By then, Pritchard had released the scenic 2016 album Under the Sun—featuring his first collaboration with Yorke—and evolved from a fiendish dance stylist into a mellow elder statesman. During pandemic lockdowns, Yorke took a trove of Pritchard instrumentals and gave them hell, shuffling synths and disembowelling basslines before sending it all back for review. Maybe it was lockdown fever, but Yorke saw an opportunity to take some strange vocal turns—the croaks, chirrups, siren songs, and sneering monologues of a voice forever lashing out at its inconvenient beauty. A chance, in short, for two serious musicians to limber up and have fun.
And that is exactly what transpires on roughly half of Tall Tales. “The White Cliffs” takes a cosmic trip to the dark side of Air’s Moon Safari; “The Men Who Dance in Stag’s Heads” is Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” dreaming of a medieval folk ballad, Yorke’s narrator a mystic Lou Reed. “The Spirit” is a bolt of silvery joy, keyboard pulse and vocal line in rapturous harmony, life-loving lyrics spiked with only a hint of irony: “I wish you well/Pray for peace/A magic spell that sends you all to sleep.”
“The Spirit” steals the show on track six, and the album could probably have started there. Yorke and Pritchard tinkered away on Tall Tales for some three years, which is not readily apparent in the sequencing or editing. Eight-minute opener “A Fake in a Faker’s World” is alluring but impenetrable, a union of outros asserting its right to form a song. When the ambient paean of “Ice Shelf” follows, you think: Here is a dark, grim record. “Bugging Out Again” better reflects the playfulness to come, but by the clunky “Back in the Game,” the duo’s mothballed productions feel laborious, faintly reminiscent of that awkward period when Damon Albarn was composing Gorillaz songs on his iPad.
