The prestige-ridden Atoms For Peace line-up, which comprises Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and their longtime producer Nigel Godrich, Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, Beck drummer Joey Waronker and David Byrne percussionist Mauro Refosco, boasts enough star power to suggest that a bunch of supergroups disbanded to make one all-seeing, all-knowing super-supergroup. Of course, we know that this is not the case, but it’s considerably more interesting than the real story, which essentially involves a lot of faffing about at festivals and performing under the ill-advised name of ??????. question Mark and The Mysterians were way ahead of them!
If there’s one noteworthy nugget in the quintet’s short history, it’s that they were (eventually) named after a track from Yorke’s solo debut The Eraser, although you don’t have to know this to guess that Atoms For Peace is, in every practical sense, Thom Yorke’s band.
The woozy flow of The Eraser and countless Radiohead productions is joyfully resurrected on Amok, and, as the title suggests, given room to run around a bit. Over nine tracks, we hear Yorke’s trademark sound, all wailing falsetto and twitchy electronics, mingle with African rhythms (‘Unless’), menacing basslines (‘Dropped’) and unruly chord progressions (‘Stuck Together Pieces’).
After this, it’s almost impossible to distinguish man from machine, as waves of what sound like fizz-buried synths and botched samples crash over the dreamy melodies. The resulting bedlam is at once, simple and complex; sure enough, you could spend hours attempting to decipher Amok’s every hiss and rattle but, with a little imagination, the beats on ‘Default’ could be a misfiring telegraph, the humming on ‘Reverse Running’, a stammering honey bee, and the echoey plinking on ‘Ingenue’, a collection of dripping taps.
It’s only when you stop playing detective that you start to hear this album for what it really is: one great, long, stuttering experiment. If I’m right, and Yorke did indeed mastermind its gentle hooks and lid-flip moments, Amok is up there with his finest flings.