https://rateyourmusic.com/review?id=77946194
Nebbish, indecisive, half-there, feathery, pretty, lush, drowning in reverb, frustratingly safe, evaporating in your ears like aural cotton candy.
The pattern I detect here is that whenever Thom Yorke And Pals consider scaling back, they panic and reflexively throw some string arrangements in there ripped straight from the nearest available Hanz Zimmer-scored blockbuster. I was all set to love where "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" was heading, with its sparse instrumentation loping along like a Kid A out-take played at half speed, and then the back half of the song came in smothered in swooping, mournful strings with the flavor of packing material. It's all very pretty, in the same way a Hanz Zimmer soundtrack is pretty, and it's all very forgettable, in the same way a Hanz Zimmer soundtrack is forgettable.
"Daydreaming" is carried by its gorgeous key shifts, its endless circular arpeggios, the twisty little swoops that the string orchestra manages near the end; but most songs here don't have as many ideas. "Decks Dark" is heavy on the ornamentation but does its job as A Good Radiohead Song without putting up too much of a fuss. "Identikit" wrestles its obligatory huge cloud of reverb into something interesting by making it out of buzzy synth stabs and a distant, echoing balloon of voices.
Unfortunately, except for the out-of-place single "Burn The Witch," there's a comfort zone that no song here wants to stray too far from. Whenever a song starts getting too energetic, it hits a ceiling to maintain the requisite levels of lethargy. Whenever a song seems like it's showing some restraint and getting intimate, something comes in to pump a thick layer of fog into the room. The lyrics are as pretty, as vague and as formless as the instrumentation. Say what you will about the much-maligned The King of Limbs: its reach may not have exceeded its grasp, but at least it reached for something!
In the end, we have an album that is not bad, but makes very little of an impression, especially considering the people that made it. "True Love Waits" is a window into what this album could have been if it had made up its mind, where the stage is finally clear enough for the drowsy piano and Thom's distant crooning to have an effect. As a song on its own, it's surprisingly affecting. As a coda to this whole affair, though, it's just tiring; too little, too late.