Greenwood, Jonny (1971- )

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    Radiohead Spinoff the Smile Gets Wonderfully Stranger

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    A spinoff of Radiohead, the trio of Jonny Greenwood, Tom Skinner and Thom Yorke pushes further from the solid ground of pop on its second studio LP, “Wall of Eyes.”“Don’t think you know me,” Thom Yorke intones near the end of the Smile’s second studio album, “Wall of Eyes.” He adds, “Don’t think that I am everything you say.” With its new LP, the Smile makes itself increasingly elusive. It’s now a band intent on destabilizing structures and dissolving expectations.The Smile is still unmistakably a Radiohead spinoff. It’s the trio of Yorke and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead, with the British jazz drummer Tom Skinner. Yorke’s tormented voice has stayed upfront, and the songwriting leans into Radiohead’s dissonances, odd meters and fully enveloping aura of anxiety.The Smile’s 2022 debut album, “A Light for Attracting Attention,” and its live recordings introduced what was mostly a stripped-down, cerebrally twisted funk band — akin to Yorke’s 2012 project Atoms for Peace, which had Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers on bass. But on “Wall of Eyes,” the Smile questions and undermines its grooves. The band often lets them emerge only gradually, then deflates them or obscures them in complexly hazy productions.In the Smile’s new songs, solid ground — verbal or musical — is rare and precarious. The priority is atmosphere, not legibility. Yorke’s lyrics are fragmentary and bleak, full of apocalyptic tidings. “Soon you’ll be there/in all that fire and ice,” he croons in “Teleharmonic,” over chords that keep sliding out from under him. The album’s most coherent narrative, “Bending Hectic,” is the last words of a driver steering along the hairpin turns of an Italian mountain road, then “letting go of the wheel.” The track is an eight-minute exercise in suspended time, meditating on two slowly alternating chords before plunging into a cacophony of hard-rock guitars.Greenwood has long had a sideline scoring film soundtracks — among them “There Will Be Blood,” “Phantom Thread” and “The Power of the Dog” — and the Smile’s new songs allow themselves to be as amorphous and open-ended as film music. They’re not about hooks or choruses. Melodies recur while arrangements change radically around them; songs suddenly leap into entirely new territory.“Read the Room” begins with prickly guitar arpeggios and a sputtering beat, veers into a pretty bridge that doesn’t stay that way and spends its final two minutes seething over an entirely different riff. “Under Our Pillows,” which may be a reproach of social media — “You give yourself freely/Nowadays everyone’s for sharing,” Yorke chides — starts with crisp cross-rhythms: hopscotching guitar picking and a contrapuntal bass line over Skinner’s stop-start drumming. But the momentum shifts, the odd meter turns into a motoric 4/4 and then recedes into un-metered, breathy spaces. For a full minute, the track is nervous but ambient. Throughout the album, the Smile’s music feels molten and improvisatory, though it’s clearly premeditated.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Beyoncé Edges Closer to Her First Oscar Nomination as Shortlists Are Revealed

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      “Be Alive,” which the superstar wrote with Dixson for “King Richard,” made the academy’s cut in preliminary voting. So did Lin-Manuel Miranda, Billie Eilish and Van Morrison.Will Beyoncé and Lin-Manuel Miranda compete against each other at the Oscars? That matchup became a possibility on Tuesday when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the shortlists for best song and nine other categories.Beyoncé and the songwriter Dixson made the cut for “Be Alive,” from “King Richard,” a biopic about the father of Venus and Serena Williams. If the song makes it through the next round, it would be Beyoncé’s first Oscar nomination. Miranda was included for “Dos Oruguitas,” which he wrote for “Encanto,” the animated tale about a gifted family in Colombia. Other contenders in the category include Billie Eilish and Finneas (for the Bond song “No Time to Die”) and Van Morrison (for “Down to Joy,” from “Belfast”), who has made news recently for songs protesting Covid-19 lockdown measures. (Eilish was also the subject of a documentary that made the shortlist.)For best score, Jonny Greenwood and Hans Zimmer might be competing against each other and themselves. Both are included twice: Greenwood for “The Power of the Dog” and “Spencer”; Zimmer for “Dune” and “No Time to Die.”Another notable twofer: “Flee,” the animated documentary about an Afghan refugee in Copenhagen, made the documentary and international feature lists. The documentary finalists included several films that made critics’ year-end best lists, including “Summer of Soul” and “The Velvet Underground.” The same goes for the international feature category, with “Drive My Car” (Japan’s submission) and “The Hand of God” (from Italy) making the cut.Members will begin voting on Jan. 27, and the final nominees will be announced on Feb. 8. The winners will be revealed in a ceremony scheduled for March 27.Here are the shortlists:Original Song“So May We Start?” (“Annette”)“Down to Joy” (“Belfast”)“Right Where I Belong” (“Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road”)“Automatic Woman” (“Bruised”)“Dream Girl” (“Cinderella”)“Beyond the Shore” (“CODA”)“The Anonymous Ones” (“Dear Evan Hansen”)“Just Look Up” (“Don’t Look Up”)“Dos Oruguitas” (“Encanto”)“Somehow You Do” (“Four Good Days”)“Guns Go Bang” (“The Harder They Fall”)“Be Alive” (“King Richard”)“No Time to Die” (“No Time to Die”)“Here I Am (Singing My Way Home)” (“Respect”)“Your Song Saved My Life” (“Sing 2”)Original Score“Being the Ricardos”“Candyman”“Don’t Look Up”“Dune”“Encanto”“The French Dispatch”“The Green Knight”“The Harder They Fall”“King Richard”“The Last Duel”“No Time to Die”“Parallel Mothers”“The Power of the Dog”“Spencer”“The Tragedy of Macbeth”Documentary Feature“Ascension”“Attica”“Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry”“Faya Dayi”“The First Wave”“Flee”“In the Same Breath”“Julia”“President”“Procession”“The Rescue”“Simple as Water”“Summer of Soul”“The Velvet Underground”“Writing With Fire”International FeatureAustria, “Great Freedom”Belgium, “Playground”Bhutan, “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom”Denmark, “Flee”Finland, “Compartment No. 6”Germany, “I’m Your Man”Iceland, “Lamb”Iran, “A Hero”Italy, “The Hand of God”Japan, “Drive My Car”Kosovo, “Hive”Mexico, “Prayers for the Stolen”Norway, “The Worst Person in the World”Panama, “Plaza Catedral”Spain, “The Good Boss”Sound“Belfast”“Dune”“Last Night in Soho”“The Matrix Resurrections”“No Time to Die”“The Power of the Dog”“A Quiet Place Part II”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More