Adam Goren’s one-man band Atom & His Package played its last show in 2003 after a diagnosis of type-1 diabetes forced Goren offstage toward a growing family and what he’s called “Plan A”: a job teaching high-school science. (He holds an M.Ed. from Penn.) What can be said of his cut-short career in pop-punk? Atom was brilliant, as sarcastic as he was kind, as blistering as he was sweet. If you vaguely antagonized this underdog, he went after you with all his teeth. If he loved you, he went after you too. Sure, some science snuck into his songs, as in “(Lord It’s Hard to Be Happy When You’re Not) Using the Metric System.” But the real magic of Atom & His Package is how this “science guy” wrote such artful lyrics and compositions. Here are his ten best.
10. “Punk Rock Academy”
Okay. Before you crucify me for putting “PRA” at number ten, allow me to say this song barely made the list. Yes, if you went to see Atom live, you’d want it to be the last song (as it is on the 2004 live album “Hair: Debatable”). And yes, he played out comedian Chris Gethard’s eponymous show with it in 2017. But I really think Atom has written better songs. Nine of them, in fact.
9. “Goalie” by The Zambonis (feat. Atom & His Package)
It’s a little startling to hear Atom backed by a real band, but it’s great too. The track features kid vocalists and interstitial making-of footage. Atom, a full-fledged dad at this point, sings lead and seems joyfully at peace with the stadium claps and wall-of-sound backing vocals. A jock-jam by Atom & His Package? Correct.
8. “Undercover Funny”
A “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode in song form: The singer’s disappointed that his coworker is “only funny when I’m not around.” It’s a really good poppy start to the band if you’re looking to get in. But be careful: You’ll find the lyrics on repeat in your head when you get up to pee at night.
6. “For Aliza Whenever She May Sleep”
A friend once told me this song is about Atom’s sister, Aliza, who was in medical school at the time. It’s a sort of prayer for her health and a stealthy rebuke of the med-school system: “Rite of passage / Healthwise amazing / Educational shroud hides amounted hazing.”
5. “Atari Track and Field / New Controller Conspiracy”
What a wonderfully odd pairing. The “Atari” intro resembles Madonna’s “Open Your Heart,” which Atom will “polka” later in the album. And like a lot of Atom’s music, “New Controller Conspiracy” trades violence and tenderness. Toward the end, a female voice appears seemingly out of nowhere:
What do you think is in store for us?
Is it living room furniture terminus?
I think that’s ninety-five percent acceptable and okay.
Yes, the guy can write, absolutely. At the same time he seems to be tempting mis- or self-interpretation. How many of us, in the chorus, hear “laughed at you” instead of “left that room”? And how “acceptable” would Atom find the error? Ninety-five percent?
4. “If You Own the Washington Redskins You’re a Cock”
Who would have guessed a Y2K punk singer could have forecasted the demise of Redskins-Commanders owner Dan Snyder? The song generally addresses the dehumanizing of racial groups — specifically within what Atom calls “Native American nicknamed teams,” which he rhymes with “awful and mean.”
3. “Upside Down from Here”
The voice from “New Controller Conspiracy” is back — singing the entire opening verse. It turns out to be Goren’s sister, Aliza (remember Aliza?): “North is not up and East is not right / Except for Milwaukee Wisconsin that night.” What the hell happened in Milwaukee? What is Atom saying about geography and physics? Unclear. Doesn’t matter. Great song.
2. “I’m Downright Amazed at What I Can Destroy with Just a Hammer”
This is maybe Atom’s best song, lyrically, and maybe his best song ever. It glides through a litany of concrete objects and proper nouns, which few songwriters, Craig Finn aside, can really pull off. Like so many of Atom’s songs, it’s about the coexistence of love and physical destruction. He wants to love you. He wants to break things too.
1. “Does Anyone Else in This Room Want to Marry His or Her Own Grandmother?”
The sweetest punk song ever. You’ll love it. Your kids will love it. It’s about, well, the singer proposing marriage to his grandma — wait — because her husband died: “It breaks my heart to see you alone / Grandma, let’s elope.” Here we get Atom’s lyrical power on full display:
I’ll pay the bills, we’ll cross the words and watch Murdoch
We’ll dine on the samples at the grocery store
We’ll find a place and paint this whole town purple
Purple-ize the walls and purple-ize the floor
Sins of Omission:
“Mustache T.V.”: Instructions for Scotch-taping a mustache to your TV screen and watching it settle onto people’s faces.
“Hats Off to Halford”: A tribute to Judas Priest’s openly badass frontman Rob Halford.
“Trump”: Listen to Atom’s delightfully condescending whisper during a conjured game of Tripoli: “I see your bad hand.”
In 2021, Goren teamed up with his childhood friend Brian Sokel to release a self-titled album “Dead Best.” Their follow-up is due out this winter.
Photo by Markbellis
Just calling this one an album is generous in pretty much every way. Seven songs in just over seven minutes is short even by Dwarves standards. And the fact that all of them just sound like someone threw a bunch of aluminum tubes down an elevator shaft doesn’t make for a good record, and barely passes for a low budget “we made it shitty on purpose” punk record.
The first album not to feature HeWhoCannotBeNamed on guitar after his brutal murder by stabbing, “Sugarfix” really shows the loss his influence has with the band. At the very least we can all be grateful that HeWho dramatically rose from the grave shortly thereafter to take over the role again like a guitar-shredding satanic christ – at which point, SubPop promptly told the entire band to “fuck right off.”
“Take Back the Night” listens like a “previously on…” recap for the last episode of a TV show that hasn’t been any good for three seasons now. It hits on a lot of Dwarves staples but none with enough depth or fresh perspective to leave any lasting impression. Ultimately it just makes the listener feel like the band would just make the jump to a feature length format already (that TV show analogy is still holding up, right?).
I was gonna kick this review off with something like “it sure is… a horror story… I mean this album… is a horror story… eh?” But besides that joke being beyond any semblance of stupid the truth is this album isn’t all that bad. It’s not good by any stretch, especially when the Dwarves have done the same thing better so many other times. But if you’re a hardcore Dwarves-head (fuck, I hope that isn’t actually a thing) then this album with probably make you smile.
Technically speaking, after twenty-five years of consistently putting out a diverse collection of albums, pretty much anything could be considered a return to form. All the same, “The Dwarves Are Born Again” births the band back to the early thrash umbilical cord they had long since cut themselves from. It may not have the same impact as those first records, but does what it sets out to do, and in this case that’s enough.
Listening to “Thank Heaven For Little Girls” has the same equivalent effect of taking a cattle prod jolt to the scrotum. It’s a quick burst of shock rock, intentional offense with no real subtext, but after it’s over you get to laugh and enjoy the experience like the low-rent “Jackass” crew of a person you are. No, THFLG isn’t gonna win any subtlety contests, but thank fuck for that because what the hell even is a “subtlety contest” – that sounds insane.
After a few years hiatus and a “greatest hits” record which omitted some of the band’s best material, the Dwarves came back with incredibly creatively sprawling and energetically fierce “Must Die.” It ended up becoming the last album they would release for nearly eight years after. And while I’m glad it wasn’t, if “Must Die” turned out to be the final nail in the Dwarves dick-shaped coffin, I think I could have been alright with them going out like that.
With age can come great insight. And in the immortal words of Blag Dahlia, “We are the sluts of the USA, we are the sluts of the USA. And we can suck and we can fuck and we can bust a nut. We wouldn’t have it any other way.” The Dwarves may not have actually invented rock and roll, but as a band they certainly personify the spirit of the genre. And this album is a strong example of the energy and attitude that makes punk rock so compelling in the first place.
“Come Clean” is a weird album, and I totally get that some of you have already fled to the comments section to tell me what a jackass I am for ranking it this high. But much like the Dwarves when they recorded this album, I don’t give a fuck what you expect from me. It’s a bold choice for a band to spend years writing the most offensive shit they can think of (and believe me, there’s still plenty of that here), but then shift gears into what is basically angry dance-pop. And by that metric alone, “Come Clean” absolutely deserves the number three spot in this ranking.
SPIN magazine once called this record “the most offensive album ever made,” which is high praise when we’re talking about Dwarves albums. “Blood Guts & Pussy” is a thirteen-minute-long rail of cocaine that you don’t even realize you’ve done the whole thing until it’s three days later, you haven’t slept, and the garbled caterwauling of “Motherfucker” is still driving you to find another fix. You can be offended all you want at this record, but you can’t ever deny that it just plain fucking rocks
Perfection has never been anything the Dwarves strove to achieve – you could even make the argument that they actively fought against perfection for their entire career. But, well, “The Dwarves Are Young and Good Looking” is fucking perfect. It hits that sweet spot between the gnarled “fuck you!” that was “Blood Guts & Pussy” and the pop heavy danceability of “Come Clean.” It represents a band that is in its “we have the exact right amount of our shit together to make an amazing record but we still need a floor to crash on” phase of their existence. “The Dwarves Are Young and Good Looking” soundly solidifies that the band will, in truth, be young and good looking forever.
Wu-Tang listeners know that the boys from Shaolin like their king Fu movies. Their songs are littered with samples and references to the Wuxia genre but it is still jarring to hear the hidden track on their debut album where each member of the clan reads out their favorite Kung Fu movies with no backing beat or emotion in their voice.
Released a month before Lennon’s murder the album features a hidden acoustic track in which Lennon dares someone to shoot him. The song is notable in that Lennon seems to imply that he wants Ringo Starr to be the one that pulls the trigger with the lines “Ringo you were shit on the drums/come and murder me ya bum.”
The Fall’s fourth album contains one of the longest hidden tracks on this list as a listener will find if they wait two minutes after the end of the final track “And This Day” they’ll hear another complete album that The Fall recorded and forgot to release. Tenacious fans will also be rewarded if they wait for the hidden album to end as that also has a hidden track which is an album-length rant from Mark E. Smith about how much he hates Morrisey.
Known for taking their music literally (while recording 1970’s “Sunflower” they ate nothing but sunflowers), the Beach Boys hid a track on their classic album with the vocals and instrumental work all performed by their own pets. While the vocals and guitar work is pretty rough, the drumming by Brian Wilson’s pet cat Leary is some of the best ever recorded.
During the Watergate affair, it was revealed that Richard Nixon was recording most of the conversations happening in the Oval Office. Strangely when the tapes were listened to, there was a missing 18 minutes that people believe were wiped to protect the president. How fortuitous then that those 18 minutes were found nestled in the end of Taylor Swift’s cottagecore masterpiece, “Folklore.” And while they don’t have the usual catchiness of a Taylor Swift bop, they do show the leader of the free world engaged in high treason in a way that shakes the very foundations of the country to its core.
The soundtrack for horny pre-2000s teens, “Hooray for Boobies” featured the classic tracks The Bad Touch, I Hope You Die, and A Lap Dance Is So Much Better When the Stripper Is Crying. What listeners might not realize is that after the final track, there is a little treat for listeners in the form of a complete 39 hour long audiobook of Simone de Beauvoir’s masterpiece of feminist philosophy, “The Second Sex.”
Patience rewards the listeners of Morrissey’s 1988 solo album because if they wait for twelve minutes of silence after “Margaret on the Guillotine” they get to hear Morrissey order 8 cheeseburgers with everything before proceeding to eat them one by one seemingly in a state of transcendental ecstasy. While Morrissey has never commented on the track, he has been known to drool uncontrollably when asked about it in interviews.
If you wait a few seconds after the end of “All Within My Hands,” you’ll be asked by the record for your name. If you answer, the album will then serve you a lawsuit from Lars Ulrich for any number of crimes be in peer to peer file sharing, not enjoying the flat drumming style of the album, or enjoying that episode of “South Park” that made fun of him. You’ll then need to appear in court within ten days.
Famously not a fan of rock and roll, Michael Jackson did make an exception for Iowa natives Slipknot. On his 2001 album, Jackson hid a cover of “Wait and Bleed” that returns the frantic anger of the original while still adding a dance breakdown and a guest appearance by Chris Tucker.
Slipknot never shied away from declaring that the main influence on their music, outlook, and appearance is the post-disco stylings of the Jackson 5. It is fitting then that they hid a track on their second album dedicated not just to their love of the Jacksons but also their love and peace and understanding. Their version of “Heal the World” may contain eight thousand separate drums but the emotions stay true to the original.
