Talk:Atomic

Take a nursery rhyme

3 blind mice

Put it into the minor key

sad 3 blind mice

Brighten it up again

Classis 70s sequencer

A really excitable drummer

Add a drum roll

And after that there's onlyone thing for it: Ennio Moricone

Atomic intro

Intro to atomic makes no sense and is the better for it

Third single on the album Eat To The Beat 1979

Not a difficult second album - it was 4th - but had on the heels of the crossover smash Parallel Lines, it was meant to be.

Parallel Lines: - Produced by Mike Chapman - Much more commercial, disciplined sound - thousands of takes - It worked: knockout singles like

Sunday Girl

Picture this

Hanging on the Telephone

One way or another

Barely rock and roll, let alone punk. and of course the standout, million-selling single

Heart of Glass

which was disco and featured of all things a rudimentary drum machine.

heart of glass drum machine

UNTHINKABLE for a band from CBGBs

Ramonies

But imagine the pressure to follow up Heart of Glass: JUST DO THAT ONE AGAIN

Heart of Glass vamp.

But the band had other ideas The band had other ideas from each other

Jimmy Destri got out his sequencer again But Clem Burke wanted to be back in CBGBs with the Ramones Chris Stein had been watching Sergio Leone movies

Atomic is an incredible mishmash of conflicting styles, moods, recording keys.

Subverts all the rules of composition It doesn't even have a verse and chorus structure.

Everything about the album, and everything about the song, is DISSONANCE.

sequencer

Three blind mice meet a marching band, they run into Sergio Leone in a New York disco, he takes them on a subterranean rollercoaster with a punk rock drummer

dreaming

at the helm on a quest to see this otherworldly blonde goddess murmuring expectantly about the on-rushing world’s end.

Drone with major minor pad

All this in an ambiguous spacetime flux, flipping madly between major and minor, switching up tempos, and exploring unseen and inhuman dimensions in between.

If this is nuclear holocaust — an atom-age rapture

Rapture

Then I want more.

[ PART 1]

3 blind mice

What? Why start there?

It plays a trick. A triumphal ascent, set to a martial, marching cadence to signify their — our — steady progress to our certain evisceration. Did you ever see such a thing in your life?

atomic cr 78

The beat is mechanical, like a machine beyond mortal control, a crazy escalating upbeat,

3 atomic blind mice

but in case we have not deduced what the nice found out, we are in a minor key? We can’t say we weren’t warned, warned, but things are beyond our reasonable power to change. At the crescendo — are we happy or sad? — a parade ground drumroll

drumroll — what is coming, and is this it, or a premature end? An adolescent spurt? A jolt, un petit mort — sex is death & death is sex, a little cresting wave, a sure-shot snareshot — stop —

atomic

ABOUT THATSEQUENCER

It is 1979 the Roland TR808 poswers the 1980s electronic revolitionshas not been invented yet:

Sexual healing

CR 78 was its predecessor. A clunky Box - hard to programme but some groovy pre-set patterns. Like this:

Atomic CR 78

Sounds a bit like heart of glass

heart of glass CR78

but faster and deeper and punchier. more insistent and driving These days you can create this all on a laptop with standard software. Compare this, looped off the blondie track (during themiddle of nigel harrison's weird bass solo) with this, whistled up in Logic pro:

Logic sequence.

However insistent it is, the CR 78 is not what propels this song, or the rest of the album. That we put down to the force of nature which is Blondie's drummer Clem Burke. He's a big fan of Keith Moon, and it shows:

If Chapman was taking the band in a commercial direction, Burke seems like a reluctant passenger.

Everything about his drumming is urgent, insistent, impatient, as we find out as the mice give way to the VAMP

THE VAMP

We open on a wide empty dustbowl, a kerrang of spaghetti western guitars

the rollercoaster clunges down into the abyss.

Now Clem Burke sets the pace, hauling frantically at the beat, a brisk four-on-the-floor stomp, dragging the band along at 135 — you know he’d go 150 if they’d only get a leg on — just two measures in and he’s given up on the quarter notes and is impatiently drumming his fingers with sarcastic hi-hat triplets as if to say, NO RUSH GUYS JUST WHEN YOU ARE READY.

Come on, man, we haven’t got all day don’t you know there’s a sweaty cataclysm going down?

But Stein and Infante and their cool-hand Ennio Morricone guitars will not be rushed.

wicked game

Their vibe is dreamy double-tracked twang and you know that this is James Calvin Willsey learnt everything he knew, God rest him.

But underneath it all this tension.

Atomic CR 808 + keyboard swells

Fast against slow. Happy in the face of sad. Lively, but morbid. Descending dark depths but somehow aspiring to the heavens. Is there a mounting, rising angelic keyboard swell?

For all the sombre sombrero guitar, that marching four-beat has got a place to be and Burke is taking us there —

[THREE]

Kaboom! There it is!

cha-cha beat

Suddenly we’re exultant: it’s a breezy major, the disco bass leads, and the drummer, Burke, is back in the pocket like he’s saying I told you so. He’s just doing the cha-cha, cheerleading now, for here is the golden goddess.

“Uh-ha, make it all right,” she sings.

After all this cultivated dissonance this seems trite and, on paper, a bit disappointing, but the way she sings it, and how Destri garlands it with pealing church-bell keyboard lines, hosannas like it’s the Eighteen Twelve, you know she’s right — uh-ha, make it magnificent.

Everything is so major and positive, even the chord progression is rising chromatically up some stairway to heaven, and beautiful hair (again: on paper —) so we know we are building to something bigger, and kaboom! there it is! A throbbing arpeggiator explodes onto the soundscape and, mixed in with the blood and ecstasy are some gorgeous minor third harmonies. We are back in the minor. The ride reaches its apex and we are falling: the roller-coaster thunders down into the depths, for you can’t understand joy if you don’t know sorrow tonight — stop.

Atomic.