#763 Atoms for Peace - Amok

My theory: this is In Rainbows from an alternate reality.

You can more or less draw a line directly from Hail to the Thief's scattered, chiming, swooning, bass-heavy rock to The King of Limbs' skittering, glitchy non-rock, and find this album along that trajectory. It's surely closer to the TKOL end, though, where its IDM/EDM/WTF roots can easily reach, where twitchy, glitchy beats, offbeats, and off-offbeats can wind n-dimensional. And as on Limbs, the key to this album is the endlessly winding bass (provided by Flea, but you'll hear none of his signatures here). They give the whole thing backbone, making the album feel downright grounded despite their percussive gymnastics and ambient, electronic pulses. Suffice to say though, if this had been released as the next Radiohead album, nobody would have called bullshit: given the last decade, this is decidedly within Radiohead's reach.

The only tell would be the lack of that Radiohead album feel, that weird way that the disparate shards of a dozen different approaches to songwriting collide and feel like part of a magnificent whole. That ability to take songs like Paranoid Android, Fitter / Happier, Kid A, Treefingers, Idioteque, Pulk / Pull, Hunting Bears, Life in a Glass House, 15 Step, Videotape, Feral, Separator (need I go on?) and make each one feel like an essential part of an album they sounded nothing like*.

Here the songs are different in atmospheric ways, in a million small ways stretched out to tones and drones. Each has its own electronic maneuver, clapping a cage around some unique sonic pokemon, trapped from another dimension and writhing and swooping in turn. The sounds really are something special. But every song has that same subdued, lurking, slinking, ghostly buzz and swoop to it, the song lengths pinned pretty tightly to 5 minutes, with no big ups, no big downs, no sudden swerves, nothing that surprises you on first listen half as much as any of the songs listed above. The Eraser similarly played samily.

And maybe there's the difference between a Radiohead album and an album that has Thom Yorke on it: he can make a Radiohead song. Heck, he can make 9 of them. But he can't quite but a Radiohead album.

As songs go, they're good. Full of tension and invention and groove, lousy with intriguing detail, but the album, as a unit barely works. Heck, even the last song, the key moment of any album (though, I must confess, yes, especially a Radiohead album) sounds like it could have been sequenced anywhere, and kind of just stops playing with little momentum or ceremony. It's emblematic of the entire album, a shining perpetual motion machine, ingenious in design, spinning in place 4/5

* Notice who I left off? Hail to the Thief was neither cohesive enough, nor did it find that magic to make its parts transcend themselves. Part of the problem might have been that 15 song length, a mistake Yorke is atoning for by making albums with 10, 9, 8, and now 9 songs respectively, if you count The Eraser in there. 8 songs! In this age? Still think the TKOL2 rumors had some merit to them.