The degree to which you enjoy Thom Yorke's toss-off solo effort, Eraser, will depend largely on how much you enjoyed Kid A and more accurately Amnesiac. As reports of a delay before Radiohead's much-anticipated 7th full Lengther, the window of opportunity for Yorke to get this bedroom-laptop opus out of his system was a wide one. With it's idiosyncratic and almost suffocatingly off-beat nature, there is enough of a David Lynch quality to it to make you wonder if Yorke is implying that Eraser is not the entire title, and he's left it up to us to complete it subliminally by borrowing Radio's head. So I rented Eraserhead and played Eraser at a low volume as I watched it and the result was even more astonishing than that overrated Dark Side of the Moon meets The Wizard of Oz coupling. If you've got an evening to kill and a bong stashed behind the cleaning products under your bathroom sink you might want to give it a try. If for no other reason than it's been way to long since you've seen Eraserhead.

Eraser has its moments, particularly when Yorke explores his vocal possibilities (without electronic assistance,) but if you're hoping for some kind of miraculous redux (perhaps an acoustic guitar ballad akin to "Fake Plastic Trees") you're as naïve as you are nuts. What melody Yorke metes out come off feeling muzzled and are unlikely to send you to bed humming a passage. Eraser is so closed-off and the shortage of elbow room becomes claustrophobic at times. I'm not suggesting that Eraser is an altogether unpleasant experience, but it sure could have benefit from a bit of expanse, something that suggests air that came from somewhere besides a vocal recording booth. Even the passages that remind you that Yorke is one of the chief geniuses on the planet are maddeningly deadened. "It gets you down, no light in the dark, it gets you down." This from "Analyze" one of the better tracks.

Amid all the blips and hiccuppy drum programming, moments of promise frequently rise to the surface. Lyrically Yorke is in pretty familiar crisis mode, though it's often unclear if these crises are personal, environmental or social or all of the above. Overall, however Eraser is the sort of album that you can listen to in its entirety and when it's over you realize you hadn't hardly paid any attention at all. Except during "Black Swan" where Yorke repeats the litany, "this is fucked up, fucked up." Though "Black Swan" is one of my favorite tracks on Eraser, the bird serves as an apt metaphor for the album in general – fowl, dark, brooding and it rarely takes flight.