Amok – Atoms For
Peace
Thom Yorke’s two most recent Big Time pet projects have graffiti’d the label “deconstructionist” all over his mechanized, rusted-out, silicon-bleeding, formerly innocent and capable-of-love self. You bring two albums into the world and title them The Eraser and Amok and you simultaneously make your intentions clear to anyone with integrative thinking skills: the world is full of artificial constructs which numb and comfort and tragically distract us; he is going to tear all of them apart with the brutal cunning of a Trained Eye; all that will remain afterward is formless chaos. In The Zone post-deconstruction, Thomas Pynchon taught us, “It is difficult to determine just what the fuck is happening here.”
The vehicle for Amok is Atoms for Peace, an impromptu band hatched out of a song title on the previous Yorke endeavor. That work, The Eraser, was Yorke’s first all-rockets-engaged foray beyond the Radiohead atmosphere, and it arrived in 2006, well after Radiohead had expanded to Gas Giant planetary status with all of the attendant gravity-crush. 2006 was three long and difficult years after the long and difficult Radiohead album Hail to the Thief, which itself tried, largely unsuccessfully, to stretch pop song constructs out into dissolute components. Thief was probably the true beginning of The Deconstruction.
(Dissenters are here going to get puffed up in display plumage about the incredibly weird and wonderful Kid A album of 2000, and how that album was so obviously an attempt to move beyond classic pop song structure. Well, no. Kid A sounded odder than any other pop record ever made by anyone, but neither it nor its sibling album Amnesiac in 2001 were anti-pop or post-pop. They were just Different and Obliquely Disturbing Pop. Which still brings the fun.)
So anyway. 2006. Hail to the Thief and The Eraser introduced and reinforced the cardinal elements of New Yorke: scattered, rushed and irregular percussion elements (real or electronic/synthetic--typically the latter this first time around;) a nearly complete absence of concrete nouns; an over-reliance on gorgeous and unique sounds (including his gorgeous and unique voice;) and the stark contrast of those beautiful sounds against unsatisfying, structure-less songs. These are among the reasons why the track totals on The Eraser, In Rainbows, and The King of Limbs are 9, 10, and 8, respectively: no one could possibly take 12 songs like this all at once.
“Sounds like fun. Thank you, Thom. Have you heard that Frightened Rabbit album?”
Thankfully, the Rebel Alliance otherwise known as the rest of Radiohead fought back with ardor. In Rainbows dropped in 2007 and The King of Limbs in 2011, and while both of them were substantially further out into Yorkedom than, say, Ok Computer or Amnesiac (at least half of the tracks on both Rainbows and Limbs sound like Thom and His Laptop Take a Train Ride Together,) there were also languid spooky ballads and warped-but-structured rockers of the type which belong in time capsules as proof that the 2000s were frequently awesome.
So now it is 2013, and Amok kicks off with “Before Your Very Eyes…” thereby roping in that badge of literary deconstructionism, the ellipsis. Yes, where the pessimist anticipated keyboard noodlings, there is instead a prominent geetar front-and-center within microseconds, but we are otherwise quite obviously in Full Yorke Mode already, pop deflector shields entirely powered up. How do we know this? Because the goddam scattershot percussion is once again All. Over. The Place.
More words are required on this topic. The two-hands-are-not-enough school of drumming or electronic beat-making has plagued essentially all of Yorke’s work since Hail To the Thief. One postulates that this is because such percussion both evokes the rapid firings of computerized electronic signals (computers figure prominently among Yorke’s motifs,) and because Arrhythmia = Chaos. Which by the way makes a person wonder whether a computer on the fritz is Yorke’s revenge fantasy or his worst nightmare.
So the drumming bursts through every seam of track 1, and myriad Sounds of Synthesis pour forth into the ether. Chief among these, of course, is that voice, which truth be told never cloys and never ever lets us down. Immediately behind The Voice on my list of loves for this song is the ear-filling eruption of sound at the 2:20 mark. The dynamics of this track, and the parallel realization that those dynamics amount to actually—gasp—building something, move us into territory beyond The Eraser. More on this later.
Tracks 2, 3, 4, 5: Again, guitar and electronic noodlings. Hop-skipping beats. And yet: background countermelodies begin to emerge. Background vocal effects follow. These are the green shoots of art that is learning to stretch beyond the confines of self-reflexive paralysis and quite earnestly aims for a semblance of beauty.
By track 6, which sports the appropriately de-deconstructed title “Stuck Together Pieces,” we are nearly back on Planet Radiohead. Flea (who oh, by the way, is the album’s bassist—which is pleasantly easy to forget during his wonderfully subtle playing,) gives us an honors-level bass line, joined eventually by relatively sing-song-y Thom vocals, and song structure which veers close to verse/chorus/bridge territory. Altogether lovely. And the prettiness persists through the album’s denouement, including an absolutely gorgeous final movement of the final track.
At the 20 second mark of the first song on “Amok,” Yorke sings “look out of the window.” Among normal humans and normal musicians, this is mundane material. From the mouth of Yorke this is somewhat stunning for including a concrete noun so early in the going. Thom Yorke lives around windows! Generally speaking, the vast majority of late-era Yorke/Radiohead song titles and song lyrics eschew such language. The music may sound like whales or creek beds, but one does not simply sing about such things with actual words. Doing so shatters or, um, deconstructs the effect.
Which brings us back to Earth, outside the window. The thing about deconstructionism is this: its purist distillations are by definition nihilistic. When you successfully tease out everything that has been artificially stuck together in an attempt at societal and personal wellbeing, nothing is left: no taste, no color, no life, no afterlife. Which unfortunately doesn’t work when your calling is To Make Art. Pynchon admitted as much by going silent for 17 years after "Gravity’s Rainbow," then burping up the contrived-by-design exercise in epistemic closure “Vineland,” and then producing his life’s greatest accomplishment: a layered, calligraphed, gorgeous construct of a love story, “Mason & Dixon.”
Is Amok a love story? No. Not nearly. But it suggests love for the first time in Yorke’s non-Radiohead existence. And that is no small step. It is a smaller step, unfortunately, than taping the goddam drummer’s arms to his sides. But progress nonetheless.
Keepers: 1-9
March 2013
