Atomsmasher — s/t

James Plotkin's latest release is a departure of the poppy and ambient activities of the last five years. The very dense material on this album is very intense and energetic.

The album sounds like Squarepusher has been drinking coffee and has been using speed for a couple of days, listening to grindcore instead of jazzrock. Electronically dissected and reassembled blastspeed drums and highpitched, frantic vocals pierce your ears in frequency regions you can cut glass with. It takes four songs to get to a point where you can gasp for air in an oasis of ambient guitar. Atomsmasher really needs some time to sink in. After a few listens it reveals the melodic content. It's somewhat similar to the way OLD's 'Lo Flux Tube' started to grow on me after some puzzling listens. You can discover some more conventional structures buried in layers of mindmelting noise. Other parts are better to consume like a very aggressive ambient soundscape.

The developments in James' music of the last few years that incorporated more 'direct' sounds instead of using kilometers of echo and reverb are also evident. Some guitar parts are very dry and others are more distant and ambient. There's a lot of aggression is this music but, just like the first Old Lady Drivers album, despite its violent nature there are definitely some humorous injections. Both the vocals and certain sounds are very funny. Personally I also see humour in the extreme amounts of noise themselves. Maybe it's the 'over-the-top'-ness of it all, but that's just me. Although everything is heavily edited and often constructed with computertools there is a strong, organic element in the music (though I have no idea how to perform something like this live!).

The songtitle 'Pokemon Gangbang' might illustrate what to expect for people with a imaginative mind. For people familiar with OLD: imagine OLD on 78 rpm or something like that.