Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke have released their debut album “Tall Tales” on Warp Records. The album is a collaboration that took three-and-a-half years to complete, with ideas exchanged over a long period during the pandemic lockdown. Pritchard’s textures on the album are alternately airy and severe, with a vintage clank that recalls Cabaret Voltaire or Throbbing Gristle at their most accessible.
The album features a variety of vintage synths, including the Yamaha DX1 and CR-78, giving it a thick, analogue character often imbued with a retro-futuristic eccentricity. Yorke’s performance on the album is borderline theatrical, adding a thrilling dynamism. His voice is sometimes electronically modified to be pitched down or up, and he swaggers, mourns, moans, and blusters throughout the album.
Yorke’s theatrical dynamism
The album’s overall mood is one of foreboding and fatalism, with Yorke singing lines like “I’m never getting out / It’s not gonna change / I hate myself / I want it to end” on the track “Back in the Game.” Despite the cynicism Yorke indulges in elsewhere on the album, the song “The Spirit” offers a moment of hope, with Yorke singing “I wish you well, pray for peace / A magic spell that sends you all to sleep.”
The album is accompanied by a visually stunning and absurd feature-length film created by Australian artist Jonathan Zawada. The film offers a fractured journey into an imaginative dreamscape, with distinct and bizarre sequences filled with psychedelic landscapes and uncanny characters.
In an interview, Zawada described the film’s primary idea as focusing on the idea that everyone applies their own narrative to the world around them, interpreting forces as positive or negative based on perspective. The film aims to visually enhance the music, collapsing history, economics, and art into a unique narrative that reflects the complexities of life. Overall, “Tall Tales” is a phenomenally successful album in terms of creating anxious songs that offer little relief.
The vibes are off by design, and the narrative is largely unsatisfying, but the album keeps morphing sonically up until the bitter end, making it a compelling listen.
