Atoms

Time: the pin in the perpetual grenade, the emptiness of night, the colors on walls, the smoke chasing the cigarette, the Mondays, the Friday, the holidays, the holy days, the essential void. Its countless holes stuffed with endless trivialities and turning television seasons; glaringly obvious to the denier yet explained away by occasional moral skirmishes or bouts of conscience. SANDS, ensconced in that very tornado, is the seminal segue; the bountiful, brooding bridge between yesterday and today. ATOMS is a triangle and its three pontificating points are perched on by Cryptic One, ALASKA, and Windnbreeze. As society seeks to redefine what a nuclear family looks and smells like, so, too, does ATOMS in their reshaped, refocused 2014 iteration.

ATOMS' je ne sais quoi is jarring now, like it was during the Def Jux era and even more so in their pre-Juxian seasons. SANDS's eponymous title track at the top is a blaring trio of Trump Card-pulling trumpets trouncing trendy Twittersphere trafficking twits. Cryptic One's earth-scorching, observant overtures overhead circling like advanced vultures; Windnbreeze's wide-ranging, luxuriously long-winded locution; and ALASKA'S massive, mournful-yet-mirthful, metaphor-laden missive. Cryptic One's oscillating organ-with-organs organized over his decisive drum programming is the decimal point rounding the equation.

Though Cryptic One is SANDS' chief conductor, the jubilantly-jaundiced Jestoneart jumps in to occupy the role of orchestrator for three critical departures. They are a series of individual ATOM transmissions from the appropriately-acculturated ancient, "desert-like", on-top-of-temple town: Talakad. They're testaments tackling each ATOM's respective time in the wilderness and the wily path that set them each back on a collision course. ALASKA experiences visions of a gullier Matt Damon and "bleeds in Technicolor", Cryptic One "never took for granted stolen glances of the branches and the leaves", and Windnbreeze professes his prowess by declaring he causes speakers to "leak mosaics." Each unique, tendentiously-telegraphed puzzle piece infuses their resounding unification with a rejuvenated fervor.

For my money, "Star Clusters" is SANDS's top shelf song. Cryptic One's melodic cacophony-through-circuitry sonic sentiment runs headlong into a triptych of treacherous tellings courtesy of himself and his ATOMS-in-arms. Whether this shapes up to be ATOMS' final collision or the rebirth of an already-roaring renaissance, well, that doesn't much matter. They've proven themselves through thoughtful themes and weathering a reality that is often thornier than it is rosier. It's high time for green energy to take a well-deserved back seat to some classic, neck-snapping, nuclear power.