4 out of 5

Label: Island

Produced by: Eric Drew Feldman

I remember very clearly: I was at an, ahem, smart camp over the Summer that was situated on a college campus; being a fledgling music dork, I had made my way to a music shop near campus, and saw that one of my holdover grunge faves – Tripping Daisy – had a new disc for sale.  The cover art and album title (the former – an explosion backgrounded to two running figures, given the ol’ 60s / 70s grain, echoing Daisy’s flower-power logo styling – amusingly coinciding with the latter) fell in line with my tastes for something that wasn’t yer popular music norm, and as part of that obnoxious mentality, I was all dumb proud to be supporting a band others would have brushed off as used bin fodder.  The fools!  So I paid whatever wacky fee we paid for new CDs, and scampered over the lyric sheet while I privated listens on my discman.

It was, at that point, one of the weirdest albums I had ever heard.  Of course, it’s much more palatable now, but following on the back of the gutsy riffage of I Am An Electric Firecracker, and to my still-learning ears, the cacophony of weirdo instrumentation and psychedelic soundscapes – admittedly I didn’t own first album Bill then, on which the hippie vibe was much more pronounced than on Firecracker – was sincerely a revelation.  I was committed to loving the disc, and listened to it ad nauseum until I did.

…Would I have been a TD fan had that been my first exposure to the band?  It’s not an immediately catchy disc, and even now, with my sophisticated listenin’ abilities (imagine me naked, save suspenders and maybe a straw hat, spittin’ into ma’ spittin’ bucket whilst listening to the latest underground hitzz on limited edition vinyl; that is sophistication, friends), I marvel at how anti-album much of this disc is, so, no, if not for the stubborness of my youthy music fanboy / indie asshole path, perhaps Jesus Hits, on its own, wouldn’t have made a dent in my collection.

But, hey, it happened the way it did.

Awash in layers and layers of noise, Atom Bomb takes a step back from the more direct snark of the group’s previous album to marry the feel-good vibes of their early college rock with the sonic experimentations that were fomented then, and that were hidden and brewed further on Elastic Firecracker.  Producer Eric Drew Feldman smoothes this all over, making the pounding drums fall in line with Tim DeLaughter’s sunshiney, slighty unnerved vocals, making the shimmery, distorted guitar and drifting bass lines come across as organic machinations.  Thrash tracks like Mechanical Breakdown and Geeareohdoubleyou become celebratory dances instead of alterna-rock throwaways, and sidle alongside the happy-day dreaminess of the lovey dovey Sonic Bloom, or Human Contact.  Group vocals start to prefigure Polyphonic Spree, and then there’s the outright unsong-like sound mashes of New Plains Medicine…

If it sounds a bit unfocused, from a construction perspective, it ain’t.  Atom Bomb ebbs and flows from structured to non-structure seamlessly, amping up the rock at key points before churlishly sliding back into sunny-day tunes.  However, the miasma does encourage DeLaughter as a lyricist to take something of a back seat; a lot of the concepts feel trite, and songs like About The Movies almost feel like concessions; attempts at followable thoughts when the disc is more representative of general feelings.  Embracing that produces some of the group’s most impressive moments, and one hell of an original disc.

Although the pick and mix of sounds, instruments, and styles is much more palatable by today’s standards, it’s still impressive in its internalized sensibilities.  Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb was not bred for audiences, or magazine covers, or airplay: it was this magical, organic creation of a group of artists feeling out and realizing the potentials they’d been fiddling with in songs past, given birth and allowed to roam free, paintbrushes strapped to knees and elbows, eventually splashing out upon a now colorful canvas that, sure, is a bit sloppy in areas, but impactful and inspirational to experience.