ONTD

This week sees the release of Amok, the debut album by Thom Yorke’s much-heralded Atoms for Peace project. The album sets Yorke with an unlikely cast of collaborators: Flea, long-time producer Nigel Godrich, REM drummer Joey Waronker, and a Brazilian multi-instrumentalist by the name of Mauro Refosco. They’re a supergroup, basically, no matter how much Yorke decries the term. And like many supergroups, they prove less than the sum of their parts — getting the idea of putting a bunch of successful musicians together to work is more difficult than it seems. For proof, check out this selection of other supergroups who didn’t quite live up to the promise of their membership, along the way demonstrating some of the problems that plague the entire concept.

Atoms for Peace

Here’s the thing with Atoms for Peace: they’re not bad. If anything, they’re too good for their own good. The music is produced beautifully, played flawlessly — but it feels too polished, like it’s a mental exercise for highly accomplished replicants or something. Compared to Yorke’s “other” band, it lacks some sort of soul; Radiohead, after all, are also excellent musicians, but they imbue their records with a tinge of emotion that’s missing here. The whole thing demonstrates a problem with supergroups: assembling a whole bunch of hyper-talented musicians doesn’t guarantee a creative spark, any more than assembling a bunch of really attractive people makes for good conversation.


Zwan

In which Billy Corgan convinced Slint’s Dave Pajo, Chavez’s Matt Sweeney, requisite female bassist Paz Lenchantin and long-time whipping boy collaborator Jimmy Chamberlin to populate his post-Smashing Pumpkins rebound project. The whole thing disintegrated in a haze of acrimony and recriminations within a couple of years, proving that egos and relationships are just as much a problem with supergroups as they are with any other group. These days, Corgan claims he’ll never speak to any of the band again: “I’ll never go anywhere near those people. Ever. I mean, I detest them. You can put that in capital letters.”


Audioslave

The archetypal “not as good as its predecessors” band, and one that embodies many of the problems that confront supergroups — if Audioslave had emerged fully formed from nowhere, with members no one had ever heard of before, they’d probably have been reasonably well received. As it was, the only thing that anyone could ever really say about them was that they weren’t as good as Soundgarden or Rage Against the Machine. So it goes.



The Dead Weather

Similarly, the Dead Weather didn’t suck, but the idea of extracting Alison Mosshart from The Kills to pair her with a past-his-peak Jack White, that guy from The Raconteurs, and the guitarist who isn’t Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age… well, we’d rather see her make another Kills record, put it that way.


Velvet Revolver

Members of Guns ‘N’ Roses with rock’s most unrepentant junkie on vocals? What could possibly go wrong?

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