Critics mostly warm to Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard's Tall Tales

Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke's Tall Tales came out on Warp on 9 May, and by 11 May Metacritic averaged 82 from ten reviews, all of them positive. It is Yorke's first record for the label of Aphex Twin and Autechre, two acts that Rolling Stone, MOJO and Les Inrocks all say fed into Kid A and Amnesiac.

Victoria Segal gave it four stars and made it MOJO's Album of the Month. Ben Devlin of musicOMH gave four and Album of the Week, tracing a line back to the band's electronic turn on Kid A almost 25 years earlier. Jazz Monroe gave 7.6 in Pitchfork, finding it short on spectacle and rich in risks, and Jon Dolan three and a half stars in Rolling Stone, with a special word for “The Men Who Dance in Stag's Heads”, which he likens to the Velvet Underground's “All Tomorrow's Parties”.

“The Spirit” is the track most of them pick out. Monroe reckons it steals the show and that the album could probably have started there, six songs in, and Segal calls it the nearest the record comes to a conventional song. “Ice Shelf” is the other common pick, unnerving to Dolan and a song about climate change to Segal. “Happy Days” splits them. Dolan tells readers to skip it, and Northern Transmissions likens it to a badly remixed Madness song and wonders how it made the album, while Devlin finds its march, oppressive and silly at once, a winning mix. Three reviewers think the eight-minute opener, “A Fake in a Faker's World”, runs long.

Justin Vellucci of Spectrum Culture gave 60, sending listeners back to Anima and The Eraser. Graham Reid of Elsewhere came away confused and disappointed, though he found it good in parts.

Segal writes that the album shows “Fitter Happier” was always a core Radiohead track. To Adam Blyweiss of Treble, writing on 27 May, Tall Tales is that song stretched to album length, with Yorke as a persuasive villain.

The reviews