Here’s a band that options Thom Yorke and Flea. There had been a variety of threads that led to Atoms For Peace, however that was one of many massive storylines when the band turned one thing actual. It was a supergroup of a Radiohead tangent, the seeming results of somebody jumbling the code for some ’90s nostalgia fever dream. Two titans from erstwhile polar ends of the alt-rock spectrum — one who made “Everything In Its Right Place,” one who made “Sir Psycho Sexy” — joined along with some co-conspirators to present Yorke’s pervasive end-times anxieties a bit extra groove.
Atoms For Peace started as Yorke’s surprising backing band when he determined to tour his 2006 solo outing The Eraser in 2009, three years late and on the opposite aspect of In Rainbows. He hit up unofficial sixth Radiohead member Nigel Godrich, and outlined his imaginative and prescient — his first two picks, Flea and Joey Waronker, signed up instantly, and the group was rounded out with Brazilian percussionist Mauro Refosco. That tour was exhilarating, fleshing out the characteristically chilly/claustrophobic electronica of The Eraser in a dwell band format. The group clicked to such an extent that they saved the get together going after the tour, getting drunk and listening to Fela Kuti at Flea’s home, kicking off three days of jamming in LA. That was it — that was how the band, because it existed, made an album collectively. Yorke and Godrich spent two years rearranging, slicing, and including to the music from these three days, leading to Amok, which arrived 10 years in the past this Saturday.
Amok was, formally, the debut of Atoms For Peace, a brand new band with Thom Yorke as its frontman. The contributions of Flea, Waronker, and Refosco had been supposedly essential — the best way their unique performances filtered by means of Yorke and Godrich’s manipulations created an interaction between the natural and digital. But from their origins because the Eraser tour band, to the truth that the album was actually constructed by Yorke and his longtime co-conspirator Godrich, proper on right down to a stark, apocalyptic black-and-white cowl echoing that of The Eraser, Amok may simply as simply be seen as Yorke’s second solo album. (At the time, some evaluations truly quibbled over this, discovering that Amok didn’t ship on the promise of its personnel when it comes to pushing Yorke into new territory.)
In one other means, Amok was a successor to Radiohead’s divisive 2011 album The King Of Limbs. There, the band had performed their components dwell and looped them, resulting in the unusual artificiality of its extra rhythmic tracks. For Amok, Yorke and Godrich’s course of appeared to take that each one a step additional — “conduct” the band as they jammed, then type songs out of that materials and add their very own ending touches and new passages to what had been performed dwell a 12 months or two earlier. The intent was to blur the place sounds got here from: “One of the things we were most excited about was ending up with a record where you weren’t quite sure where the human starts and the machine ends,” Yorke informed Rolling Stone in 2013.
The complete factor sounded futuristic, thrilling, experimental. But in some methods, much more so than the weirdness of a RHCP x Radiohead crossover occasion, the lengthy course of of making Amok overshadowed the album itself, or set it as much as be… not fairly as mind-blowing as its premise instructed. The oft-cited afrobeat affect was noticeable right here and there — largely in opener “Before Your Very Eyes…” — and maybe Yorke’s want to make a straight-up dance report was coming nearer into view as effectively. Compared to his major gig’s usually bugged-out forays into digital compositions, Amok was actually hotter and extra muscular — “Ingenue” slithered and squirmed with all method of sinuous synths and peculiar raindrops-in-a-cave sounds, “Dropped” surged ahead to a beautiful climax of wordless vocals and throbbing synths, whereas the closing title observe ended the album in a cascade that might virtually play like true launch or transcendence within the context of Yorke’s work.