- There’s a weight of history behind ATOM: a storied trip through the annals of post-punk. The stories belong to its members, the tenure they held in many different bands and still more bands whose influence can be heard creeping through their debut full-length, In Every Dream Home. It’s sort of surprising then, that this bunch of veterans would shrug off the weight of all that and come crashing at us, full force, immediate and unrelenting. In the words of ATOM’s Edwina Preston, “don’t have to yell”, but hell, she does anyway.
Preston is joined by Harry Howard and Ben Epworth, and between them can claim membership in such outfits as Crime & The City Solution, Harry Howard & The NDE and REPAIRS. ATOM gives a cheery wave to those bands from across the other side of the post-punk genre. There’s little of layered complexity here, which I don’t mean as an insult, it’s just that ATOM hit you with a force more like NUN than any of those. Edwina, Harry and Ben file off their own list of bands that are influential on their sound and it goes much further back: Chrome, The Cramps, B52’s, Suicide and even the zany cosmic noodling of Hawkwind. While ATOM doesn’t sound like any of those individual bands, if you squeezed them through a juicer, the resulting cocktail might well be the sound of Every Dream Home.
At its best, the ATOM sound is brash, in-your-face, full of chutz-pah. What I think is the earliest single for the record, Russian, gives you a good idea. Over the cheesy drum machine, lightly distorted synth and clucking guitar, Edwina simply yells: she's the girl at the discotheque who is very convinced she’s the ****, ‘coz every other girl is just ****. “I like to think I’m an extraordinary girl / I speak your language, I speak your lies / I do not feel a single pain inside when somebody dies!” There’s a manic quality to the little narratives of these songs, told by misfits, losers, grifters and shifty types who’d be predator just as quickly as victim. That’s borne out by Harry Howard on the very next number with the self-explanatory moniker, I Used To Win.
In Every Dream Home adds up to a mugshot parade of anti-heroes and, strangely, sometimes feels less like you’re listening to a record and, thanks to the soundtrack, more like you’re watching a Youtube stream of trailers for old John Carpenter films. There’s an endearing similarity to the rogues gallery here and the protagonists of They Live, The Fog, or Big Trouble In Little China. Often it’s more like you get the briefest flavour sketch for a pilot, but if you’re in any doubt that you’re in for a b-movie double, look for the times when ATOM completely Troma out, as on penultimate number, Aliens: “ You smell dead / You look clean / Where have you been … / The aliens have been seen / There's a hole in the computer screen / Just a hole where you used to be / Is that where you've been? / You're like a machine.”
The flipside of all that immediacy is a real timelessness, I caught myself wondering whether the narrative of this record really is retro, or did the synth-backing just make me think that? Sadly it may be that the skeezy reality of 1983 is nastily similar to 2019. Final number, No Future, crystalised it for me: Howard rambles maniacally about no future, no past and no hope and I feel like tomorrow Regan could nuke the Russians, or maybe Trump will just fire off forty tweets as the world burns. Maybe though, just maybe, Buckaroo Banzai will leap out of the forty-first dimension and drag us all to safety. Whatever the future actually holds, I think you’ll find me living in the same strange, dingy fantasy world as ATOM.
- Chris Cobcroft.