The last time Atoms for Peace played in London, only two band members turned up: Thom Yorke and producer Nigel Godrich appeared at an "arts space" in Bethnal Green, east London, armed with laptops and a guitar. This seemed a little odd given that Atoms for Peace were a band initially formed to play live. Yet it also made sense: their album Amok wove together sections of the band's studio improvisations with electronic arrangements so intricately that you wondered how it would work on stage.
As it turns out, it works rather well: better, in fact, than on disc. For one thing, the band are not only dexterous enough to pull off Amok's mid-song shifts in sound and mood, but amplify them. The opener, Before Your Very Eyes, starts out as pattering Afrobeat, then abruptly surges into oppressive electronics; the contrast in tone between Unless's verse and chorus is so marked it feels like a musical equivalent of someone suddenly turning the venue's lighting on. And for another thing, they play with such ferocity that the main problem with Amok, namely that the songs attached to the riffs are pretty sketchy – ceases to matter. The pummelling intensity of Stuck Together Pieces is such that its lack of a real tune seems almost beside the point: it just works as a piece of writhing dance music. Their version of Harrowdown Hill, meanwhile, is flatly astonishing. On Yorke's solo album, The Eraser, it had the same emotional tone as most of his political songs, a sort of defeated weariness: tsk, typical. Tonight, it sounds livid, alive with anger.
There are moments where the act doesn't quite gel, where the music becomes too slippery to get a grip on, its genesis in stoned jam sessions a little too obvious – a descent into impenetrable murk. Still, you can fill such moments by imagining the reaction of a Radiohead fan circa OK Computer if you told them that one day, in the not-too-distant future, Thom Yorke would appear on stage in London sporting a ponytail and what Americans call a wifebeater vest, while to his left, Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers – clad in a skirt – decorated Yorke's songs with a profusion of slap bass, gurning and jumping around. Indeed, rather than being curbed by the sombre tone of the material, Flea's standard muscular persona seems to infect the rest of the band. At one juncture, Godrich – not one of rock's naturally flamboyant showmen – joins in with Flea in a display of eyeball-to-eyeball head-shaking, albeit in a manner that tells you quite a lot about British reserve: a suitably improbable image from an improbably successful show.
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