The Wake

Jonny Greenwood has a lot of talent. With Bodysong, Greenwood’s debut solo release, he proves just how much talent he has. Frolicking in music genres such as jazz, rock, avant-garde, classical, and electronic, Greenwood constructs a makeshift sculpture out of these conflicting elements, sounding like Ornette Coleman covering an Autechre song with Philip Glass conducting. Speaking in binaries, there are two corollaries to this mode of songwriting: (1) the opposing elements synthesize into something unique and fresh, or (2) the hyper-eclecticism ends up sounding fragmented and misguided, like a song with an identity crisis. Luckily, Bodysong is the former. The album was recorded as a soundtrack for a dialogue-free documentary of the same name. Directed by Simon Pummel, the documentary is a visual collage, compiling sourced images spanning the past 100 years. However, without having previous knowledge of this, you would’ve never have known the LP was a soundtrack. Each song flows effortlessly into one another, while the 13/8 time signature of “Nudnik Headache” and the polyrhythmic disaster of “Convergence” shows that any visual accompaniment could only take away from the music. Though not album of the year, it surely exceeds Greenwood’s other band’s most recent album, Hail to the Thief.