Atom and his Package

First off I just want to say how much I hate this venue. The staff are rude, the (hot, flickering) lights are kept on during the whole gig, and the walls are a hospital ward-type mix of sickly yellow and drab brown. On top of that Atom isn't even headlining, some hardcore band called Good Clean Fun are, hence the room is split straight down the middle; on one side, geeky Burning Airlines t-shirt wearing kids, on the other, a bunch of spiky blue-haired punks embarrassed by the unexpectedly bright lighting exposing their spectacularly dull Rancid jackets. The word 'awkward' springs to mind, and no amount of unfortunately accented yelling by the first support band can alleviate the tension. Atom, however, is in a league of his own.

The fact that tonight's line-up consists of, in the squinty-eyed one's own words, Atom and His CD Player, as oppose to His Package (a big flashy-light box with a CD player hidden inside it), has little impact on the crowd tonight. Sure we're denied the spectacle of an inanimate box with some LEDs on it, but the humour of seeing Atom jump offstage between every song to hit the skip button more than makes up for this.

Much in the same way an alien observing a pair of Italians immersed in a heated conversation might think that erratic hand-movements were the medium through which they communicated, with the speech perhaps just setting the mood, any unsuspecting member of tonight's audience could quite easily have mistaken Atom for a comedian, with his 'songs' acting as mere fillers. I mean let's face it, he doesn't exactly play any instruments (beside the occasional twang on his guitar), and his singing rarely consists of anything more than lazy daydreams (…I had a dream when I was in high school that I attended the Punk Rock Academy…) and spontaneous bouts of deranged laughing. The very idea that back in the States people actually mosh to this stuff boggles the mind. Nonetheless, to describe the blissful sequencer-heavy three minutes of Happy Birthday Ralph as anything but genius – REAL musical and lyrical genius – would be to kick Chino Moreno in the nuts and crown Hear'Say the kings of nu-metal.

So, musically he's cool. The Package / CD Player provides the weird drumbeats and odd spooky sound effect, he smiles a lot and sings in a semi-angelic semi-retarded voice, and every now and then we're treated to one or two chords from his guitar. Without the jokes, however, seeing Atom live would be like going to the cinema to watch a film you already own on VHS. There's no crowd interaction, it’s the same volume as at home, and visual stimulation (minus one Package) is zero. Thankfully any threat of Atom (real name Adam, by the way) abandoning his mid-song banter vanishes the moment he kicks into the story behind his (plagiarized) song Shopping Spree.

You'll have to catch him live if you want to know how that one ends though.