Music Review: Atoms For Peace, Amok
Published on March 28th, 2013 in: Current Faves, Music, Music Reviews, Reviews |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.
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