I know this is not a film review, but I just had to post it anyway.
You know you’re a rock star when your offshoot side project of another one of your side projects fills Barclay’s Center. On Friday September 27th Atoms for Peaces played Barclays Center, the second stop on the North American leg of their tour for their 2013 release Amok.
You know you’re a rock star when your offshoot side project of another one of your side projects fills Barclay’s Center. On Friday September 27th Atoms for Peaces played Barclays Center, the second stop on the North American leg of their tour for their 2013 release Amok.
The brainchild of Radiohead front man Thom Yorke and
producer extraordinaire Nigel Godrich Atoms for Peace is a continuation of Yorke
and Godrich’s foray into the world of dance club music that started with the
2006 release The Eraser.
Amok the record is
definitely best listened to on headphones. It is not traditional dance music
and at times its bizarre harmonic swathes evoke Schoenberg rather than Tiesto,
but to pump up the energy live Yorke and Godrich recruited the Chili Pepper’s Flea
on bass, the excellent Joey Waronker of Beck (and R.E.M if you care about
R.E.M.) on drums, and percussionist Mauro Refosco.
On the record, Godrich’s produced beats and loops amply power
the tracks, but live these tracks
combined live with the heavily stacked rhythm section of Flea, Waronker, and
Refosco created something that was on the surface dance music, but with a
mesmerizing funked-out polyrhythmic Brazilian Samba school flavor that, in the
good old fashioned way, kind of rocked.
Flea and York jumped around the stage with boundless energy while
flawlessly staying connected to the rhythm section’s super tight, hypnotic
grooves. Yorke’s voice soared like ambrosial audio above the mix, but
production wise, the show seemed under rehearsed. Song endings were messy, either
too abrupt, or trailing off without conviction, the lighting tech missing cues,
dimming stage lights seconds too late, after songs had clearly already ended. It
seemed obvious that their were kinks in the live show had yet to be ironed out.
In a venue as large as Barclays Center an act really has to
bring all they got if the want to
supercharge it. Despite the numbers of screaming fans, and the dazzling and
impressive LCDs that backdroped the stage full
of gear, the band just couldn’t power the venue. Despite all the on stage energy,
the show felt more like something you’d watch at Radio City than a stadium rock
show. Even the actual volume of the sound itself was very low. I am notorious
for wearing earplugs, and for this show, I took them out. The most disappointing
factor of all was the shortness of their set. I felt it there should have been,
at the absolute minimum, five more songs.
Although the show was bit of an overall disappointment, still,
for a Yorke devotee like myself, the rarity of witnessing Yorke’s Midas touch
live was far more reverberant than the disappointment that Atom’s for Peace
music is just not proper stadium rock.
