Atoms for Peace's Amok is out

Amok, the first album by Atoms for Peace, is out on XL today in the UK and tomorrow in North America. It has nine tracks over 44 minutes, in a sleeve by Stanley Donwood. The group are Thom Yorke, Nigel Godrich, Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers, the drummer Joey Waronker and the percussionist Mauro Refosco, who first came together in 2009 to play Yorke's solo album The Eraser live and took their name from one of its songs. Godrich produced the record and plays synths and keyboards.

One title is borrowed from Radiohead. “Judge, Jury and Executioner” is the subtitle the band gave “Myxomatosis” on Hail to the Thief; here it is a song in 7/8, which Sam Richards in Uncut describes as built on taps and gated handclaps.

The album grew from three days in a Los Angeles studio and about two years of cutting and rearranging. Yorke has said the band wanted a record where you weren't quite sure where the human starts and the machine ends³, and more than one reviewer says it is hard to tell the players from the programming.

Most critics take it as Yorke's record more than a band's, and several call it the follow-up to The Eraser. Angus Finlayson in Fact hears Amok as denser and subtler than The Eraser, if short of its bold moments, and sets it beside Radiohead's own turn to the club, when they asked Shed and Pearson Sound to remix The King of Limbs.

American Songwriter counts Flea on five of the nine tracks, his bass often low in the mix. Stuart Berman, reviewing it for Pitchfork, thinks the record finely made but inert and wants more Flea, whose playing on “Stuck Together Pieces” and “Dropped” he rates its best moments. “Dropped” is the track most reviewers pick out.

The scores