Amok
Atoms for Peace
XL
As much as the idea might pain Thom Yorke, an enemy of rock cliché, with his new band Atoms for Peace, he is essentially conforming to one of the stereotypes of self-congratulatory rock star behaviour - forming a supergroup. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, you would find them, Eric Clapton invariably on board: a new project featuring household names, in an exciting new formation. Rock fans would salute these feats of powerbroking. Arenas would sell out. Egos would be stroked.
With its high-profile line-up, Atoms For Peace certainly conforms to the definition of a supergroup, if not the spirit. The band sees Yorke, himself the frontman and songwriter for Radiohead, arguably the world's most adventurous rock band, joined by Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers on bass, by Joey Waronker, the former drummer of REM, and Mauro Refosco, an in-demand Brazilian percussionist. Super-producer Nigel Godrich, who has brought eerie whooshing and deep reverb to every Radiohead album for 15 years, joins on programming, production, laptop, live guitar and any other plate that needs spinning.
In practice, Atoms for Peace is anything other than a supergroup. With what long-term observers of his career might call his traditional perversity, Yorke has essentially brought in some very famous musicians in order to make what is his most inscrutable work to date. Like the wealthy connoisseur who is able to keep sublime works of art for his enjoyment alone, with Atoms for Peace, Yorke is able to take talents of immediately recognisable character and grant them anonymity. An album of melancholic electronic chording, buzzing synth riffs and skittering drum machines, the only human presence on the album, unless you listen very hard, is Yorke's own. It would be difficult to prove he didn't make Amok at home on his computer. Depending on your point of view, this is either a band writing on an exciting tabula rasa, or toiling under their leader's yoke.
"Band", however, as he has been keen to point out in his limited pre-publicity for the album so far, is a wretchedly outmoded way of thinking about Atoms for Peace. Rather than Yorke writing anything so bourgeois as a song and having the musicians play it while he sings the words, Amok's music was created over a two day jam session in a house in California's Laurel Canyon. What followed was a lengthy post-production process, in which the recordings were shaped into workable form by he and Nigel Godrich.
The band is a strange balance between freedom and restriction. Availability, when big names like Yorke and Flea meet in a group, is obviously key. When Atoms for Peace play live dates in March it won't be as a full band, but as a duo, Yorke singing and playing while Godrich manipulates sounds behind him. When Yorke speaks about what his ambitions are for the group, it's with more of this sort of thing in mind: music given direction by mere intimation, with infinite possibility.
All of which would seem to imply that Radiohead is some kind of decadent, elephantine creation. In fact, that band has long been the high-profile testing area for Thom Yorke's experimental policies. It was once said that the British music press "built them up to knock them down". With Radiohead, Yorke himself served as the band's harshest critic, building then dismantling the edifice of the band's epic guitar rock, and in the very late 1990s replacing it with a game-changing, largely electronic new direction. The band have since dispensed with record companies. Yorke himself, meanwhile, enjoys the freedom of frequent collaborations, appearing on records by hard-driving German techno duo Modeselektor and masked hip-hop artist MF Doom. At times, he seems like a celebrity running from the paparazzi.
Atoms for Peace were formed as Yorke extended his brief still wider with a solo album called The Eraser, and needed musicians to play the material live. There was nothing particularly alienating in The Eraser, the songs tapping into a recognisable Yorke world of personal alienation and political conspiracy (Harrowdown Hill addressed the apparent suicide of Dr David Kelly, the British WMD expert, in 2003). The use of piano made it attractively familiar. Live, the band's performances were different again, attaining a rhythmic drive similar to the work of Can, the German experimentalists of the 1970s.
Amok finds Yorke and Atoms for Peace unmooring themselves still further from anything you might expect from a band and from a song. Here Yorke's voice isn't so much the focus of the album, but something that emerges from confusion, much as one might home in on a familiar language when dialling through radio static. The words, meanwhile, have been worn down to fragments of language that float free of a conventional narrative. At times, it feels as if the drive towards abstraction is born of disappointment, that linguistic systems have broken down against insurmountable odds.
Still, for all its dystopian feel and remoteness, this is often a very beautiful album: it opens with Before Your Very Eyes, which sets up a high watermark of innocence which is then acted on by time and experience, the events of a dangerous world. Here, as they often are, the words are composed of lightly thrown British vernacular phrases, from which we are left to fill in the background information. "You're young and good looking," Yorke sings, as a funky guitar riff gives way to an electronic wash, "The keys to the kingdom …" The subsequent Default features a busy hip hop-influenced keyboard riff before opening up to include more cinematic chords. Lyrically, it feels like a telegrammed report by someone who has let themselves down and is resigned to the consequences: "The will is strong/the flesh is weak … I've made my bed/I'll lie in it …"
As the album goes on, in fact, the sense of individual vulnerability builds through a series of SOS-style text messages: "You got me into this mess, you get me out …" (from Ingenue) through to more vaporous and explicitly vulnerable lines like, "I am weightless in your arms …" (from Unless). It's the very opposite of an indulgent musician's album, with the "human" element of the music (chiefly Flea's bass) barely perceptible until Dropped, Stuck Together Pieces and Judge Jury and Executioner (apparently the most collaborative song the band have yet written). It's an odd device: the warmer the music sounds in its last third, the darker the album seems to get.
What gives all this abstraction some direction is a sense of mounting threat. On a song like Stuck Together Pieces you will be brought up fast by another isolated vernacular phrase, this time used in a more menacing way: "Just tell us where the money is …". By the time we arrive at Judge, Jury and Executioner (a phrase denoting summary justice Yorke has been drawn to before), the mood has built to a disturbing interior monologue of repeated phrases, important among them, "It's all been decided …".
As always with Yorke, this time, it's personal. Rather than a writer merely of whiny introspection (as his detractors would have it), Atoms for Peace seems to have a larger goal: to hook the ear with a phrase, a moment of beauty and encourage you to listen harder and perhaps to think more. It's an album that is abstract because it wants you to pay more attention to what it might be all about (loosely: the erosion of the individual by some remote and all-powerful illuminati).
It's true, on some level Yorke wants to have his cake and eat it too: to escape from a limelight that he has already helped redefine, while still knowing that what he's doing has a substantial audience guaranteed. This is a pretty unfamiliar record, but since it features his magnificent voice, it's certainly not an alienatingly experimental one. It is not, for example, the same stretch for Yorke's fans to listen to Atoms for Peace as it might be for Blur fans to get into Damon Albarn's Chinese opera or his own supergroup featuring Flea, Rocket Juice and the Moon. In fact, for Yorke, the ball remains very much in his court. Just how far underground does he want to go, and how much escape does he want from his audience's expectations? He could do it, of course, but it's only by a self-defeatingly perverse gesture - namely, not singing - that he could genuinely surprise anybody and finally escape his unique selling point. As his records have gone to great lengths to illustrate, however, having a voice is the most important thing of all.
John Robinson is the associate editor of Uncut and the Guardian Guide's rock critic. He lives in London.
