Like a lot of young bands, Regular John haven’t yet arrived at a definitive sound. On this decidedly untidy debut, the Sydney quartet cycles through gurgling stoner-psych, scream-y punk and torrid garage-blues, sometimes compressing all three into a single song. It’s delivered with effective velocity and muscle as well, but it’s not the lack of focus on any one genre that drags down The Peaceful Atom Is A Bomb. It’s the lyrics.

Words might be a minor concern for a band that aims for such a muddy, disorienting sound, but it’s hard to ignore the glaring clunkers littered throughout the album. ‘The Lonely Sky’ suffers from basic rhyming patterns (“Imitator/Major hater” and “Soul pollution/There’s no solution”), there’s a mention of “a razorblade satellite” on rugged opener ‘Transmitter’, while the more melodic ‘Final Solution’ rails limply against police and government: “What right do they have to control what’s in my mind?”

Maybe one can blame the “shit load of hallucinogenic drugs” cited in the band’s bio for Regular John’s often paranoid fixations and adversarial relationship with much of the world? ‘Language’, for example, features the knee-jerk cage-rattling of a jaded teenager: “So fuck your corporate bullshit and fuck hypocrisy/Fuck your greed and your apathy/Fuck society.” This is from a band whose album is being manufactured and distributed by Universal Music, by the way.

Faux rebellion aside, the album’s 14 songs rip up the road with intensity, and producer Tim Powles from The Church does his best to rein in so many flailing influences. To wit, the four-piece jump from bluesy riffing to spacey jamming on ‘Fractals’, crash into Stooges-style anthem-making on ‘Yes? No? Maybe So’ and evoke memories of grunge on the closing ‘Sedan Drive’. They even manage a sweet little refrain on Panic: “I won’t do you no harm” (though that may be a nod to Hendrix).

Still, it’s a better place to start than with so much weed-addled rage against the very machine of which Regular John has already become a willing cog.

by Doug Wallen