Written by: Dave Cantrell

So, ha! This is kind of funny. The writer, with his wife and dog, leaves his long-adopted home town to settle into a cozy (and more sustainable) retirement in a small, historic railroad town – or perhaps let’s be honest and say ‘village –  in Northern California, kissing goodbye the relative musical frenzy of his former haunt with a certain note of relief as it marks a full half-century of rather avid involvement in music that stretches from Winterland in his teens and twenties to the Coffin Club in Portland in his sixties with countless wayposts dotting the biographical trail over the many years, settles in with a sigh of well-deserved contentment and then what happens? One of his favorite publicists offers him, in his role as senior editor for Stereo Embers Magazine, a rather stunning single/video preview that originates from that very place he’d lumbered out of eight months prior and now the entire tug-of-war between that (inevitable) sting of lingering regret – in truth never really that sharp of a sting – and the lure of relative retirement paradise, a tussle that had been safely and decidedly won by the latter side, is back on to a degree that he wouldn’t have bet possible as he’d not have bet on a song being strong enough to reset that scale but, yet, wouldn’t ya know it, here we are with the latest from Portland combo Sun Atoms unsettling, in just about the most gorgeous way imaginable, what had been an easily sustained detente. I guess I should be upset or something but when music’s this engaging, this effortlessly poptastic, when it’s just as effortlessly idiosyncratic enough to build a new musical cult around, when in truth I’m sat at me desk making a dancing-while-typing fool of myself, how can I be anything but ecstatic and thankful. Exactly. I can’t.

Whimsical, slightly (one might even say ‘whimsically’) perverse but above all pulsatingly addictive from its trippy melodic pop core to its psychedelic fringes, “Take This Love,” released digitally and on 7″ July 26th on Little Cloud Records and coming on the dark and powerful heels of “Ceiling Tiles,” finds the Sun Atoms in a dalliance with that ageless, generally unavoidable human dilemma of having to tell what, by the sound and feel of it, is a freshly left lover that they can eff off while trying not to seem like they’re enjoying it too much, a dubious goal from the outset seeing as the opening line (repeated multiple times throughout) is “please take this love / and shove it up your heart.” But while that lyrical bon mot is a guaranteed and well-deserved attention-getter, it wouldn’t mean jack if it weren’t encased in what is almost certainly the catchiest goddamned catchiness we’ve been, umm, caught in this year and likely a fair portion of the last. I mean, with lyrics as acidically witty as we have here attached to a forceful ‘pop gem’ of a song structure, it’s not a stretch to imagine Pete Shelley coming back to life just long enough to congratulate these six Atoms (Peter Holmstrom, Jsun Atoms, June Kang, Mars de Ponte, Eric Rubalcava and Derek Spencer Longoria-Gomez) on a job exceedingly well done before fading back into the light. We could go on, of course, but what’s the point? When a song speaks as strongly for itself as this one does it’s far more effective – not to mention wiser – for us to simply step aside but before we do allow us to add this: the Reign of the Sun Atoms has just begun, and to us, they could not have named themselves more accurately, that name encompassing, as it does, the natural range and brilliance at play here. [can’t wait until July 26th? Us either, which is why we went here to catch up on all things SA up to this point. You’re welcome.][band photo: Lisa Hagen Glynn]