The Atari Star
Shrp Knf Cts Mtns  (Johann's Face)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2002

Tension and release are common currency in pop music, and a hell of a lot of the stuff that irks me skews the ratio overwhelmingly towards the latter. Release, says I, must be earned; cranking out a payoff means nothing if it hasn’t been set up properly. Failure to recognize this results in the “don’t bore us, get to the chorus” mentality, the treatment of the Who’s “See Me Feel Me” (not the name of the song, not that anyone cares) as a single and the recent spate of oversingers that threatens to overtake the hearts and minds of impressionable music listeners like a lion bearing down on a limping gazelle.

Unresolved tension is a different story entirely. If the journey’s satisfying enough, it doesn’t ultimately matter where you end up. By design or no, the Atari Star’s Shrp Knf Cts Mtns embraces this philosophy, playing on our knowledge of the clichés that abound in the saturated alt-marketplace and defying our expectations at almost every turn. Just when you think that distortion is going to envelop the chorus of a song like “Someone More Deserving Than Myself,” it doesn’t, nor does singer Marc Ruvolo choose the moment to engage in increasingly impassioned emoting. Instead, they just hold steady, the instrumentation drier than a lint trap and the vocals no less stoic for being deliciously melodic. And that, through entirely passive means, jacks up the tension even further via the simple expedient of no release, which means we’re waiting, expectantly, for something to happen. And then they’ve got us. It’s not a question of the Atari Star failing to deliver so much as a decision to see what can legitimately be done to forestall resolution further.

In so doing, the band finds a comfortably nervous tone, that of a spring about to snap, and doesn’t deviate from it until “Archipelago,” a piano-and-violin ballad that closes the album with about the same degree of success as all album-closing piano-and-violin ballads. It dissipates the tension but doesn’t quite resolve it, and there’s a part of me that actually prefers it that way, as though resolution at that point in the album would somehow be dishonest to everything that’s come before. Sometimes endings aren’t so neat and tidy, and Shrp Knf Cts Mtns plays utterly fair by the rules it establishes; you may like it or loathe it, but it’s all of a piece, possessed of a singular sonic stamp like a skewed, electric John Wesley Harding played by the Flying Nun crowd circa the mid-’80s. And it unnerves me on a fundamental level like no band since Possum Dixon.

Back to reviews