Amok

Far from capturing their kinetic live energy, AMOK feels as isolated, distraught, and feeble as the characters littered about in Donwood’s tragic portrait.

Thom Yorke used to make better music than the nine anemic Atoms for Peace cuts here.

Yorke, it goes without saying, is a fine songwriter, so there's nothing particularly wrong with the solid AMOK. The problem is that there's nothing incredible about it, either.

There’s no mistaking the album for anyone but Yorke’s, but despite his rep as a singular genius, he does play well with others.

Though the roster of Atoms for Peace suggests a perfect blend of talents, the resultant amok is too much, too rapid, and too overwrought to reach the group’s full potential.

There are moments of warped magic--haunting melodies, neat instrumental hooks, surprising turns of key and mood--but there are also times when you suspect it might have been more interesting to hear what Yorke and his collaborators came up with in the studio before it got eaten by ProTools.

Though far from the full-on dance album Yorke's DJ gigs and 50 Weapons single had presaged, Amok does feel like a collection of tracks, not songs.

Apart from a precious few exceptions, none of the gathered musicians seem able nor willing to push each other into new musical territory that could yield fresh revelations about their union.

A striking, if flawed, first step. However offputting the band's genesis may seem, it's hard not to be intrigued as to where they might go next.

It's all typically hard work to decipher, both lyrically and musically, but unlike Yorke's earlier endeavours with Radiohead, this time I'm rather less convinced that it's going to be worth the effort. It's certainly less fun.

Yorke's lyrics, consisting mainly of repeated aphorisms and clichés ("A penny for your thoughts", "I've made my bed, I'll lie in it"), don't suggest any great depth.... But the sounds, bringing in elements of tropicalia, Afro-funk and laptronica, with glitches, rainforest sounds and superb analogue-synth squelches (if anyone steals the show here, it's Godrich), mean you hardly notice.

Yorke's second album away from Radiohead is surprisingly accessible for one so extensively jammed then spliced together by machines.

Recorded in just three days, it suffers many of the problems familiar from blues or jazz jam sessions, a sense of introversion as musicians focus their attention on each other rather than the listener, producing overlong grooves full of technically audacious moments and no overall purpose.

It's another cautious portion of well-made, moderately experimental not-quite-rock. [Feb 2013, p.49]