Kevin Westenberg

More than happy to outsource the drums for this one

​Almost exactly a decade ago, the purring electronics of Kid A threatened to marginalize real-life Radiohead drummer Phil Selway's role in the band he'd initially co-founded in name of alt-rock--the sort of alienated-by-technology lament you'd expect frontman Thom Yorke to write a song about. But Selway persevered, and now, with his first solo album, Familial, he's fallen about as far from that tree as possible. He hardly touched the drums at all this time, instead outsourcing that task to Wilco drummer and occasional abstract-percussion space cadet Glenn Kotche, and gingerly stepping into a new sort of spotlight as an acoustic-wielding singer-songwriter. Elliott Smith's influence runs strong on these delicately strummed tracks, Selway's quiet whisper cooing over songs steeped in striking sentimentality.

Radiohead has, of course, consistently demonstrated their unmatched mastery of the balance between organic and synthetic, and nobody's as worried about Selway's continuing place in the band as he might have been himself circa 1999. But if the machines had won, Familial shows that he'd eventually have found his way to another artistic life, one less about pulses and structures than about asymmetrical and thus very human expressions of love and fear. Because that's one thing that computers can't do. Yet.

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