Album Review: Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke - "Tall Tales"

Tall Tales is worth a listen and an occasional revisit, especially the album's strongest and most enticing moments, where you'll find exactly what makes Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke shine amongst the dark, shrouded, creepy electronica that they each present.

Warp - 2025

Thom Yorke's a busy man. The Radiohead frontman has been releasing music from The Smile, his consistently excellent side project along with scores for films and has been touring the live circuit at a pretty steady pace. His band The Smile, comprised of Radiohead bandmate Jonny Greenwood, percussionist Tom Skinner, and Yorke himself, have put out three fantastic albums over the past three years, the latest two coming out last year. You would think that the man would simply take a break but he's keeping the train going with a new collaborative album with Mark Pritchard. Pritchard is a longtime collaborator with Yorke, providing production and remixes for the band (2011's "Bloom") and Yorke singing on Pritchard's "Beautiful People." His music slants into the experimental techno and house music of the 90's through famed Warp Records, the UK label that famously influenced Yorke in Radiohead's Kid A era, making this a full circle moment. At this point in both of their long running careers, why not come together and make a new album together under their own names?

Tall Tales is the new project from Yorke and Pritchard. It relies on Pritchard's obtuse, eclectic and icy electronics matched with Yorke's hauntingly iconic falsetto vocals. On paper this is a match made in heaven, what would've only been a dream for hardcore Pritchard and Yorke fans until now. The two collaborated during the pandemic in 2020 and the themes and sound often correlate with those times. Themes of darkness, helplessness, evil, greed, much from humans themselves. This shouldn't be a surprise for Yorke fans, considering his lyrical takes in the past from himself, Radiohead, or his other musical projects. The album is also a visual one, having a film component for each song. I haven't seen the entire film yet, but if it's anything like the music video from the album's lead single, it'll be freaky, disturbing, and weird as hell. That lead single in question is "Back In the Game," a single is a fantastic representation of what Tall Tales does best. The brass and horn led instrumentation has a quirky, carnival like bounce to it that can be both menacing and danceable at the same time. It's fiery, brooding, and has all the lyrical themes of helplessness, isolation and terror that are so dark that all you can do is laugh through the pain. He also references his famous "sucking a lemon" line from Kid A's "Everything In Its Right Place" by singing "sucking like lemons all over again." That alone is worth a listen for all the diehards out there.

There's a certain vibe of restlessly dark and hypnotic electronics and repetitive grooves that remind me of Yorke solo records like 2014's Tomorrow's Modern Boxes or 2019's Anima. Both are albums that are seemingly enjoyable and interesting for the modern fan, whose grooves and sonic palettes are experimental enough to be challenging and sometimes even daunting. At over an hour in length, Tall Tales isn't for the faint of heart. It's quite a long hour, or that's how it feels for me. There are songs that vie to be very solid highlights like the breakneck pace of the chiptune quirk of "Gangsters" or the pummeling post punk of "The Conversation Is Missing Your Voice." Both are gems, while the latter sounds like almost a Smile deep cut. There are also songs that go for so long and recycle its ideas without change that their knots get a little frayed as a result. These songs include "The White Cliffs," whose eight minute runtime isn't necessarily justified. It's very pretty and dreamy with its pillowy and eerie synths and drum machine but does this really need to be this long? The same is the opener "A Fake In a Faker's World," which does fare much better in its eight minute runtime than the prior mentioned track, but its length isn't exactly necessary.

Some are so strange and obtuse that they aren't really ones I want to come back to, where the song's ideas don't really warrant them. Take the album's title track, where there are so many layered, altered vocals with effects over swirling ambient noise I just don't really seem to need to return to it. It is genuinely the album's freakiest and most demented moment. It's got some cool production, but I wouldn't really deem it as "enjoyable." It reminds me as to why I don't really care for Tomorrow's Modern Boxes, an album that has some interesting ideas but they aren't fully fleshed out into actual enjoyable songs. "Happy Days" is also some truly demented shit. It has a repeating marching band percussion and horns, with Yorke rambling on as a creepy, slurring carnival barker. It's one of the album's better ideas and it's executed nicely, a la "Back In the Game." "The Men Who Dance In Stag's Heads" is starkly intimate and lowkey with its classical instrumentation and beautiful vocal harmonies from Yorke. It's a surprising graceful, still moment in an otherwise chaotic track listing. "The Spirit" is also another moment where it lightly lifts up into a classic Ok Computer styled ballad. "Wandering Genie" closes the album in an anticlimactic fashion, where its a dreamlike ambient piece full of swirling layered vocal harmonies that never seems to end in its five minute runtime.

Like much of Yorke's other solo material or side projects, Tall Tales has its highs and lows with more thrilling highs than its head scratching lows. There's a lot going for it, where much of the album sounds like both Pritchard and Yorke fitting together like puzzle pieces while other moments seem to be either not working or are simply good ideas that aren't executed enough. I could see hardcore fans of Radiohead, Yorke, and Pritchard loving this album and I don't really blame them. It's one of my most hyped albums of the year and for the most part, it generally meets my expectations. It's one of the better and more unique albums in the Yorke solo/collaborative catalog and I would rank its highlights as some of the best songs I've heard this year. Its themes of "rich, greedy scoundrels sitting at the top of the corporate food chain reaping their rewards while everyone else suffers" is a Yorke standard and still one that's as just as timely as it was on records like Hail to the Thief. Tall Tales is worth a listen and an occasional revisit, especially the album's strongest and most enticing moments, where you'll find exactly what makes Pritchard and Yorke shine amongst the dark, shrouded, creepy electronica that they each present.

My Rating: 7 / 10

Favorite Songs: "Back In the Game," "Gangsters," "The Conversation Is Missing Your Voice," "A Fake In a Faker's World," "The Spirit"