The American Dollar
Atlas
2010
Yesh Music
As I've said before, one of the unexpected fringe benefits of blogging has been receiving press releases and review requests from record labels. However, I'll be honest and admit that they're often met with skepticism and general disinterest. As much as I love blogging, I don't like being told what to blog about. Then it becomes a job, and I don't want a job - I want this to be a hobby, just like listening to and collecting music. In the last twelve months, I can't even count the number of requests for reviews of features I've gotten, and the vast majority of them go unanswered.
Occasionally, though, there's a big payoff. When The American Dollar, a team of high school friends hailing from Queens, New York, contacted me with a download of their newest full-length album, Atlas - their fourth, incidentally - I decided I'd give it a go. It's not often the band themselves sends me a message, and that personal touch has a strange way of catching my attention.
I try not to induct albums into my Essential Albums right off the bat too often. It does happen, but a record has to be something very special, very unique, and damn near Earth-shattering for me to truly say "Yes, THIS is an album that everyone should hear and have in their collection." Atlas is just such a record, and it is that rare payoff amidst a sea of requests for generic bands whose labels are trying to pass them off as the next big thing.
Released on January 1st, 2010, Atlas is already the new year's first great album. This is the type of material that is almost assuredly going to end up on this reviewer's Best Of list come December, and perhaps that's why the band contacted me. Maybe they actually took the time to read my blog, learn my taste in music, and figured I might like what they had to offer. Maybe they were just looking for free promotion. Whatever the reason, I'm glad I didn't pass their e-mail over like so many others.
Atlas is a 54 minute collection of spacey, melodic instrumentals that combine live drums, guitars, bass, and piano with tinges of electronic. Drumbeats stutter, keyboards echo and hum, and all manner of trickery is employed, combining two very different genres into one perfect blend. It simultaneously pushes both post rock and electronic music forward by dipping its feet in both pools, but never diving headfirst into either. It appeals to fans of moody, somber ambient music and uplifting, empowering guitar-driven power ballads.
It's almost indescribable, the way in which it takes hold of you from the onset of the first track, "A Few Words", and doesn't let go until the final notes of "Escapist" die down. It guides you through a range of sounds, thoughts, and feelings as only truly brilliant music can. It conjures images of life's most beautiful moments as well as its most sad, but is ultimately an uplifting and fulfilling album.
It is the rare album where you think each successive track can't possibly be better than the last before being proved wrong 12 more times after its opening. Describing each track by its structure or instrumentation is utterly pointless, because this is something that just has to be heard. You need to hear the glacial beats of "Frontier Melt" echoing into the distance as synths buzz, keyboards twinkle, guitars weep, and piano accents the piece. I can't truly describe the majesty of it all, except to say that it's amongst the most powerful things I've ever heard.
Listen to the guitars howl during "Flood", or the way the drums and electronics cascade over one another during "Age Of Wonder", or the soft, delicate piano of "Equinox", and tell me what words are adequate to describe it? Admittedly, my vocabulary isn't the most expansive, but I doubt there's a word in the entirety of the English language that can truly do justice to what Atlas sounds like.
There are times when even the most cynical people, like myself, have to accept the fact that there just isn't anything bad to say about something - and this is one of those times. I cannot find fault in what The American Dollar have created with Atlas. It's a work of pure, unadulterated brilliance, beauty, power, and it easily ranks as one of the best records I've heard in the last decade, to say nothing of the first few days of 2010.
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