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Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb
07/07/1998 3:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Mike Lipton
It's no secret that Dallas popsters Tripping Daisy are adept at cultural scavenging. In the past, inspiration has come in the form of Italian cult artist Guglielmo Achille Cavellini (prominently featured on the cover of 1995's I Am An Elastic Firecracker) and James Bond movies (Goldfinger inspired the track "Cat And The Golden Dog"). This time around DT auteur Tim DeLaughter has pillaged the title of an incredible CD by venerable Alabama gospel group John Alexander's Sterling Jubilee Singers. And while "borrowing" (or stealing, for those who don't admit it) is not necessarily a bad thing, the band's oddball imagery--bizarre, kitsch and camp--is generally at odds with the music, which is fairly "normal" mix of Beatlesque psychedelic pop. Not that "normal" is bad thing, either. In fact, Atom Bomb presents a more cohesive unified front than the band's previous Island discs. The band has ditched its Alice In Chains edge, instead mining the flowery, swirling pop of bands like XTC or the quirky pop of They Might Be Giants. At times ("Sonic Boom"), the lyrics are so earnest they border on parody ("when love gets inside of you it makes you invincible") or the absurd ("Mechanical Breakdown"). Taking a three-year sabbatical after Firecracker gave the band plenty of time to write, and the 15 tunes (clocking in at nearly an hour) are almost too much to digest at one sitting (or a 200-word review). But if only a few tracks knock your socks off ("Waited A Light Year" and "New Plains Medicine") there's also surprisingly few stinkers.
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