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Jun 4, 2013There are moments of warped magic--haunting melodies, neat instrumental hooks, surprising turns of key and mood--but there are also times when you suspect it might have been more interesting to hear what Yorke and his collaborators came up with in the studio before it got eaten by ProTools.
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Mar 4, 2013Yorke's second album away from Radiohead is surprisingly accessible for one so extensively jammed then spliced together by machines.
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Mar 1, 2013Though far from the full-on dance album Yorke's DJ gigs and 50 Weapons single had presaged, Amok does feel like a collection of tracks, not songs.
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Feb 28, 2013There’s no mistaking the album for anyone but Yorke’s, but despite his rep as a singular genius, he does play well with others.
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Feb 26, 2013Amok is a palatable piece of 21st Century electronic pop that generally sounds complex without really being that complex at all. It’s as smooth a surface as Yorke has ever painted, without grain or contour. It seems designed to say little, to equivocate, to slither around the perimeter of our expectations.
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Feb 26, 2013Yorke, it goes without saying, is a fine songwriter, so there's nothing particularly wrong with the solid AMOK. The problem is that there's nothing incredible about it, either.
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Feb 26, 2013AMOK might be a weaker, meeker product than the output of Radiohead, but its compact nature, its genre codes, and its context are what’s important here. AMOK sums up Thom Yorke as he stands to today.
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Feb 25, 2013Far from capturing their kinetic live energy, AMOK feels as isolated, distraught, and feeble as the characters littered about in Donwood’s tragic portrait.
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Feb 25, 2013Yorke's lyrics, consisting mainly of repeated aphorisms and clichés ("A penny for your thoughts", "I've made my bed, I'll lie in it"), don't suggest any great depth.... But the sounds, bringing in elements of tropicalia, Afro-funk and laptronica, with glitches, rainforest sounds and superb analogue-synth squelches (if anyone steals the show here, it's Godrich), mean you hardly notice.
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Feb 22, 2013Recorded in just three days, it suffers many of the problems familiar from blues or jazz jam sessions, a sense of introversion as musicians focus their attention on each other rather than the listener, producing overlong grooves full of technically audacious moments and no overall purpose.
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Feb 21, 2013A striking, if flawed, first step. However offputting the band's genesis may seem, it's hard not to be intrigued as to where they might go next.
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The WireFeb 15, 2013It's another cautious portion of well-made, moderately experimental not-quite-rock. [Feb 2013, p.49]
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Feb 21, 2013Apart from a precious few exceptions, none of the gathered musicians seem able nor willing to push each other into new musical territory that could yield fresh revelations about their union.
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Feb 26, 2013Though the roster of Atoms for Peace suggests a perfect blend of talents, the resultant amok is too much, too rapid, and too overwrought to reach the group’s full potential.
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Feb 26, 2013Thom Yorke used to make better music than the nine anemic Atoms for Peace cuts here.
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Feb 22, 2013It's all typically hard work to decipher, both lyrically and musically, but unlike Yorke's earlier endeavours with Radiohead, this time I'm rather less convinced that it's going to be worth the effort. It's certainly less fun.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 99 out of 112
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Mixed: 11 out of 112
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Negative: 2 out of 112
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Feb 26, 2013
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Feb 26, 2013
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Mar 18, 2013This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.