Music Review: Atoms For Peace, Amok

By J Howell

One of the most difficult considerations in music criticism lies in following an artist’s career for the long haul and remaining objective enough about said artist’s work to give it a fair shake. This notion really hit home for me in a major way recently while listening to and thinking about the most recent Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds record. Push The Sky Away is a record I came to fully appreciate only after at least a dozen spins—long enough to finally let go of some of my expectations from Cave and the Seeds and just listen (review).

That’s kind of the bitch of following a body of work enthusiastically over years (or decades). Avoiding becoming jaded is a subject far beyond the scope of this review, but even if it seems obvious, it’s worth noting that after a certain point, it’s hard to get the same life-altering feeling you got when you heard “Tupelo” or “Taut” or Bone Machine or Doolittle (wait—scratch that, I still get that teenage feeling listening to Doolittle) or “Paranoid Android” for the first time.

What we get in return for following where people like Cave or Polly Harvey or Thom Yorke—with Atoms For Peace’s Amok—lead may not always be that immediate, profound experience of hearing something important for the first time. When you’re lucky, though, the sense of growing and changing, maybe even maturing (it’s okay to wince; I did typing) alongside such artists, finding their work still (and sometimes strangely) relevant to where you find yourself right now, can be just as rewarding.

This is not to say that Amok is Yorke’s finest work, with or without Radiohead. There’s not much here that’s likely to raise the hairs on the back of the neck the way Kid A did, at least not immediately. On first listen, much of Amok is pleasant enough, though on the surface there’s a certain, ambiguous sameness from one track to the next that can make paying close enough attention somewhat difficult. At least initially, it’s easy to dismiss this record as The Eraser part two, especially for Yorke fans who aren’t particularly enamored of that record. Give Amok enough time, though—I suggest listening multiple times on decent headphones or noise-cancelling earbuds—and details emerge that do raise hairs.

Whether or not that subtlety is a virtue or a vice is entirely subjective, but I rather like it. While much of Amok‘s sameness may be largely due to the apparent shared aesthetic between longtime producer Nigel Godrich and Yorke, some of the record’s brightest spots are where the lines blur between artifice and tactile musicianship (Atoms For Peace also includes Flea, sometime Beck drummer Joey Waronker, and percussionist Mauro Refosco). When it becomes difficult to separate programming from performance, the devils in the details are quite crafty and ultimately enjoyable, if less than jarring. There are some tracks that stand out, however: the second single, “Judge, Jury and Executioner,” “Unless,” and “Reverse Running” each rise somewhat about the almost trancelike state Amok induces as a whole.

Though the songs on Amok tend to run together without a fair amount of attention paid to them, the groove the record creates is deep and ultimately enjoyable. Yorke and Godrich seem to have as much affinity for sounds straight out of the first few Mega Man games as anything, and listeners who have picked up on and enjoy that aesthetic will find a lot to love in Amok. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine Amok as a pretty great, fitting soundtrack for a robotic Pinocchio coping in a dystopian future, battling misappropriated technology and human mongering, itself an apt analogy for modern life in many ways. Brilliant.

Amok was released on February 26 via XL Recordings and can be purchased from the Atoms For Peace website.

Tour Dates:
Sept 24: Philadelphia, PA at Liacouras Center
Sept 27: Brooklyn, NY at Barclays Center
Sept 30: Fairfax, VA at Patriot Center
Oct 2: Chicago, IL at UIC Pavilion
Oct 16: Los Angeles, CA at Hollywood Bowl
Oct 17: Santa Barbara, CA at Santa Barbara Bowl