The Smile – Live at Montreux Jazz Festival Review

Just seven jazz-rock-styled songs are enough to give The Smile a booming, memorable appearance at Montreux Jazz Festival. Their statement of intent is clear. Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, in need of a new avenue for their creative output, find comfort in the free and wild charms of jazz. Seven tracks of haunting chemistry and a real effective, lingering presence to tracks which, at the time of performance, were hardly known. Intensity lingers on every strum, each note filled with some real and raw fear as the band explores a completely unknown territory. Yorke and Greenwood pool their experiences and their longevity as collaborators together for seven tracks of intense and varied quality. Opener Pana-Vision is just the start, the looming horrors held at bay for as long as it can.  

Which is not long at all, for Thin Thing follows it up with an erratic and eerie instrumental working from Greenwood. It soon turns toward harsher rock strategies, those bits and pieces on The Opposite are a real shake-up. Thankfully The Smile is enough to shake off some fatigue grasped at by a man who sat awake for sixteen hours fiddling around with keyboards and vaguely notable singles. Lean back into the stylish charms of Speech Bubbles, one in a series of tracks designed to free up space for Yorke to experiment with his vocal range. He is frankly extraordinary and has been for some time – though here he sounds impressed by his own range. Radiohead often flickers in the back of the mind when listening to The Smile not for the comparisons and contrasts made in the music but, occasionally, you can forget Yorke was a member of anything else.  

Such is the quality of The Smile, who lay out their layered instrumentals to perfection with this spot at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Free In the Knowledge & A Hairdryer starts simple enough but soon the rush and boom to follow create those perfect cacophonies The Smile chased so consistently on their debut record, A Light for Attracting Attention. This live piece has the same tones and charms but with the live energy brought into the spottier moments, clearing them up and clarifying intent with a continuous and well-developed live sound. Though it may seem impossible to do this given the spinning parts and various cogs in their studio work, the transition Yorke, Greenwood and Tom Skinner on drums make is remarkable and borderline seamless. 

Those film score experiences are benefitting Greenwood. He bashes away at his guitar and uses anything he can get his hands on to make the sounds and crashes of electric cut deep. His use of a bow to file at his guitar while Yorke doubles up the noise, the slap of cymbals rushing through, it creates such a wild and desirable experience. To crawl into these songs and make a home there would be a pleasure, how fiery and exciting they are on each listen is monumental. The Smile is a project which booms in all these wonderful ways – most of them far removed from the expectations Yorke is usually saddled with. Here are grand and swaying instrumentals which are built for Yorke rather than from – it makes all the difference on pieces like The Smoke and You Will Never Work in Television Again. A unique buzz pours from these tracks, and it always will.