Amok

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.

Amok is a tenaciously rich and strong album that is certainly the work of gifted musicians.

True, nothing here ever astonishes, but coming from such a unique voice, the familiar bests most else. [No. 96, p.51]

Producer Nigel Godrich has made of this a modern masterclass--and one that sets the bar for collaborations extremely high.

Although Yorke’s songwriting prowess is still very strong, this record is by no means perfect.

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

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.

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.

As a product of Yorke’s mind, AMOK represents a measurable progression over The Eraser. It’s more experimental, varied, nuanced, and likeable.

Amok ends up sounding enormous through its mingling of analog and digital sounds. It’s intricately assembled, with more pieces to pick apart than on The Eraser, which feels a bit timid in comparison

AMOK is an album you'll need to spend time unpacking, which means it's cut from the same cloth as every good Radiohead album. But with this one, maybe you'll get to dance a little along the way.

Amok is a palatable piece of 21st Century electronic pop that generally sounds complex without really being that complex at all. It’s as smooth a surface as Yorke has ever painted, without grain or contour. It seems designed to say little, to equivocate, to slither around the perimeter of our expectations.

AMOK is as heady and immersive as any great Radiohead album, but those comparisons eventually wilt: Yorke's new band has discovered a symmetry all its own.

AMOK is heady dance music, in love with its jittery rhythms but never content to give over to them completely.

The chief difference between AMOK and The King Of Limbs is how alive and invested AMOK sounds, almost as if it’s a do-over of the frequently airless Limbs.

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.

Awash with beats, rhythms, electronics, the occasional guitar and Yorke's soaring if still mostly unintelligible tenor, Amok is a record to get sonically lost within, a work whose every measure teems with a quality and a precision that only musicians at the top of their game can touch.

Yet the easy chemistry between everyone on Amok means that more often than not the record is beautiful.

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.

AMOK might be a weaker, meeker product than the output of Radiohead, but its compact nature, its genre codes, and its context are what’s important here. AMOK sums up Thom Yorke as he stands to today.

The songs don’t prize catchiness; they’re too busy tweaking and interweaving, toying with texture and momentum.... Yet at the same time, there’s sheer exhilaration in the profusion of rhythms.

As technical achievement, Amok is an amazing album in many ways. As a collection of songs, it’s as slippery as its rhythms.

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

Amok is, above all, a very pleasurable listen, basically just the sound of some talented middle aged dudes enjoying themselves. Let it wash over you, and you’ll enjoy it too.

AMOK isn’t quite dazzling, but it’s a clear improvement on its predecessor, and more than enough to win over old fans--and perhaps a few new ones, too.

In other words, this is another Thom Yorke solo album, and it sounds really nice on decent headphones.

For all the rhythmic chicanery at play, AMOK feels strangely static and contained, giving a perpetual sense of jogging in place.

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.

Amok might not be easy--why should it be?--but it’s never anything less than interesting, an accolade that can rarely be applied to artists this far into their career.

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 and Godrich have quite ironically produced a fairly solid, if not stellar, Radiohead album.

AMOK is a surprisingly unassuming album in that way; each song has worthwhile hooks and accessibility is favored over abstract experiments.

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.

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.

It’s a dense work that’ll be discovered thriving equally happily in the niche of teenage bedrooms as in underground cults and a nebulous haze of mushrooming Mixcloud communiqués extending over the horizon.

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.

Amok is missing the end-of-days urgency of Yorke's paranoid-android persona--and despite Flea's presence, it could be filed under "anti-funk."

While Atoms For Peace inevitably doesn’t display that unique chemistry which is evident in spades when Mssrs Selway, Greenwood et al join the party, it remains an intriguing, if at times uneasy listen.

Amok isn’t an album to be analyzed so much as experienced, preferably with headphones maximizing its occasionally mesmeric effect.

Anyone hoping for 'The Eraser' to fledge further results will be similarly dumbfounded. But taken at token value, Amok is a very fine work indeed.

[Amok is] the warmest, grooviest album Yorke has ever made--nine songs where next-level laptop science collides with wild, funky improvisation.

As ever with Yorke's work, a strong desire not to get stuck in a rut results in a few experiments that don't quite pay off, but largely, AMOK is a slender, admirable record well worth investigating.

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

Amok shows Yorke successfully synthesizing his obsessions into a compelling and complete universe. [Mar 2013, p.92]

It'll take a while to sink its clawed into you, but once it does, it won't let go. [Mar 2013, p.88]

This seamless synthesis of sinew and silicon is crucial to the album's slippery feel: there's a pleasing fluidity and crooked funkiness to the arrangements that Yorke sometimes struggled to achieve on The Eraser. [Mar 2013, p.66]

While Amok--like The Eraser--is unlikely to arouse the same passions as, for instance, In Rainbows, it’s an often fulfilling and fascinating indulgence.