Perfect Punk Album #3: Rainbows From Atoms

Music as Dissolution of Self

Jul 12, 2026

Album: Rainbows From Atoms

Artist: Lungfish

Label: Dischord Records (1993)

Runtime: 11 songs, ~40 minutes

So, I’m now three entries in on this perfect punk album series, and I think this may be one of the most controversial selections I’ll offer. Who knows, though. I’m often surprised. But I figured, I don’t want to wait on it; I want to throw this out now, and see what happens. It’ll keep me honest and push me to keep digging deep to articulate why I select what I select. I’ll warn you: this is a long one, so strap in when you have the time.

The first one I wrote about, Spirit Assembly’s Welcome to Lancaster County, is beloved but undervalued in large part because it’s been intentionally kept off streaming services. But it was important for me to start with a solid one that was close to home and wouldn’t be an obvious choice except for those who grew up with them (don’t worry, there will surely be a Fugazi entry). The second one, Sunny Day Real Estate’s self-titled album, or LP2, or The Pink Album, as I called it, comes from a scene heavyweight, one where it’d be a shock if they weren’t included, albeit most people talk about Diary. This third selection, Rainbows From Atoms, from the Baltimore natives and Dischord Records stalwarts, Lungfish, I suspect, may raise some eyebrows. So, let’s go.

The reason I suspect there will be some controversy is that while some friends love Lungfish, they have a reputation not just for repetition but for monotony. The standard critique is that if you’ve heard one Lungfish song, you’ve heard them all. That their albums bleed together. Or that if they start strong, they struggle to maintain that grip throughout. And while I think some of that reflects a laziness on the listener’s part, I get it. There is repetition within their songs, and a familiar motor that drives across many of the tracks. And for a series on perfect punk albums that’s built on one deceptively simple test, no skippable track, Lungfish’s musical style puts my test to the test. I believe Rainbows From Atoms passes it.

First, some background. Lungfish has been a constant. They’ve put out 12 albums from 1990 to 2012. For me, when I listen to them, I hear Baltimore all over it. It brings to mind, for instance, the dissonant runs of Tonie Joy (Moss Icon, Universal Order of Armageddon, Born Against). Baltimore has continued to produce angular, trance-leaning music to this day, as seen in the soundscapes of the avant-garde, jazz/post-rock band Horse Lords. It’s Baltimore punk to me. And growing up in the scene in Newark, Delaware, this loomed large.

I actually found Lungfish through my older sister, Melissa. In fact, she was the one who found the door to punk for both my brother and me. She propped it open, and then Matt and I barged on through. Not only did she do this by the handful of albums she had, but more through her friend network. She gave us immediate credibility in the scene (never mind even making us aware there was a scene!). Of course, Matt and I had to find our own way, but at the very least, we weren’t met with contempt or dismissal when we showed up. Since she was cool, we were given a pass. And when you’re 14, and everyone else is 19 to 25, it means everything. It was an acceptance.

I would often sneak into my sister’s room when she was out (which was often), and go through her CD collection. All these bands, with such strange names at the time: Samiam, Jane’s Addiction, The Cure, Poster Children, Jawbreaker. That’s how I first found Lungfish back around 1993, and their 1992 album (and first on Dischord Records), Talking Songs for Walking.

I was drawn in immediately. But it wasn’t until the last five years or so, and, truthfully, not until I was in my free jazz and spiritual jazz deep dive, which brought me to Indian ragas, that I could truly appreciate them and have the ears to hear them. Because here’s the thing about Lungfish, and about Rainbows From Atoms in particular: the repetition is the point.

With Lungfish, you know what you’re going to get. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Yes, it can feel repetitive. But it’s meant to be. It’s meant to be meditative, a way to lose your sense of time and place and self inside a rhythmic sound. The repetition isn’t a flaw the record survives. It’s the whole design.

Which is exactly where it collides with my test, and I want to be honest about the collision rather than smooth it over. The whole point of a Lungfish record is to sink in and lose yourself, to let the tracks blur into one long meditative flow. But “no skippable song” asks the opposite question: does each track stand on its own? Those two things look like they’re at war. A record built to dissolve into a single trance shouldn’t also be a record of eleven distinct, essential songs. And the quiet miracle of Rainbows is that it’s both at once. You can drop the needle and let all forty minutes wash over you as one continuous thing, and you can also go track by track and find that every one holds its own shape. Sink-in and stand-alone, in the same forty minutes. That’s the needle it threads, and it’s why it passes.

And before anyone calls the sameness simple, try to actually play it. Pick up a bass and hold the line from “Open House” steady, for the length of the song, without drifting, without your hand cramping up. It is hard. For Rainbows, repetition isn’t the absence of effort. It’s a discipline, the same muscle as sitting in meditation and coming back to the breath every single time the mind bolts for the door. These guys aren’t coasting. The trance you fall into on the other side of the speakers is built out of their refusal to break the one they enter.

Understanding Lungfish the way I do now helps me make sense of the lasting impression from when I got to see them and play with them back in 1996.

The show was in Delaware with my band Network 34. It was in a church hall. There was a stage in the hall, but all the bands of course set up on the floor. I was a teenager. They were not, and that was the first thing that hit me, before a single note. These were actual adults. And on Dischord! They were legit. Grown men, calm and a little remote and cool in a way that had nothing to do with trying to be. It was honestly kind of imposing. And then they started. Higgs stood up there with this voice, this incantatory thing, his hands and arms, covered in tattoos, moving in slow shapes over the top of the drone the other three were building, and I swear a spell was being cast on the room. It was hypnotic. It was also, if I’m honest, a little unsettling. I didn’t know whether to move or hold still. I took photos that night, and even looking at the stills months and years later gave me the same feeling. I’ve seen a lot of bands and played a lot of shows, and that is still one of the strangest and best experiences I’ve ever had in a room with a band. A séance is the word I keep coming back to.

That’s the spirit of it, and it’s also written all across Rainbows From Atoms. I want to get into the mechanics of the songs though, because the drone isn’t just a mood, it’s built, and the building is the thing the “one song a hundred times” crowd never looks at closely enough.

First off, the thing that keeps all that repetition from going flat is the groove. It’s not drone for drone’s sake. It’s not one simple beat hammered over and over. The bass tracks bluesy lines. The guitar plays octaves up and down the fretboard. So the thing that’s repeating is already full of motion and blues and weight, which is exactly what lets you fall into it without it ever going dead. A single beat repeated is monotony. A deep groove repeated is a trance.

I had no words for the droning quality to when I first heard them at 13 or when I played with them at 16, but do now, because of my recent deep dive into experimental jazz. It’s the same thing a good Indian raga does, and the same thing the spiritual, Eastern-facing end of jazz does, the Coltranes, John and Alice, and Pharoah Sanders’ explorations that stop being about chord changes and start being about staying in one place until the place cracks open. Using that repetition as a meditative, even metaphysical, reaching for something beyond yourself.

You can hear the whole method announce itself in the first song. “Instrument” kicks off on spiraling guitars and a long vocal howl, Higgs’s voice quavering as he bends it downward and holds it out there in the air. No words yet. Just tone. My head bobs along, my feet move, immediate and involuntary.

Then comes “Abraham Lincoln,” layered vocals stacked on the chorus, the guitar clean but with the gain pushed up and the reverb wide open, so the whole thing swirls around your head like weather. The bass walks, and your head goes with it, back and forth. And the drums do most of their work on the hi-hats, building the rhythm as atmosphere instead of assault. No blast beats. No big crash cymbals. Which is its own quiet argument about punk, and one I’ve come to believe in: you can have every bit of the energy and the power without a single blast beat or cymbal crash. Power is a feel, not a volume.

This is also a song where Higgs’s words push up through the wash and grab you. “Will you resist the burning urge to burn? / Will you refuse your right to choose your type of execution? / That cushion that you’re sitting on.” Most of the time, you’re not parsing his words; you’re receiving them, the way you take in a chant. The words aren’t information. They’re one more loop. But every so often, one surfaces clean and lands, and it lands harder for everything around it that didn’t.

And then, so as not be pinned as pure mystic drone, they throw “Animal Man” at you. For me, it harks back to the post-punk of the late seventies and early eighties, almost a Talking Heads kind of vibe, jittery and bright and a little funny. There’s a playfulness to it. And that’s the thing you can miss under all the serious invocation: these guys are also having fun in there. Which matters, because a record that was nothing but solemn drone would be a lesser record, and a little bit of a put-on. The fun is what keeps the seriousness from tipping into drudgery.

It’s also where my worry about this band answers itself. Line up “Instrument,” “Abraham Lincoln,” and “Animal Man,” and they’re unmistakably the same four people doing the same thing, and they’re also, clearly, three different songs reaching in three different directions. Unison, but not uniformity. That’s the trick I couldn’t explain for years. The sameness is real, and the distinctness is real, both at once.

Then, there’s “Fresh Air Cure,” which has to be one of the best grooves ever laid down in punk. I don’t say that lightly. It’s the fullest version of everything I’ve been describing, the bluesy bass and the octave guitar and the hi-hat push all locked in so deep that you stop noticing the groove as a thing and just find yourself inside it. It’s the track where the sinking-in is most total and yet still playful. Which, since that’s the whole point of the record, is why it’s the peak of the feel.

With “Open House” you can hear the discipline as a shape. Everybody lays back except for Chriest (again, try playing this line). Osborne plays just two chords through the verse. And then, right before the final pre-chorus, the guitar drops out completely, and for a band this committed to keeping the weave intact, that sudden empty space hits loud. Then it launches, heavy, and the launch lands twice as hard because the drop-out loaded the spring. They build by taking away.

“Open House” is also where you should put on the headphones, because of what they do to the voice. Higgs’s main vocal comes up the left channel, and a reverberating echo of it answers from the right, so he’s on one side of your head singing across to the other. It turns your skull into a room. Or better, a cave, a space you go down into and explore, which is exactly what this record is asking of you.

“8.14.2116” lets the guitars fly. Where the rest of the record builds its drone horizontally, by holding a figure and staying in it, this one goes vertical, layering guitar over guitar until the tracks smear into a single spiraling thing. And it points forward as much as back. You can hear it setting a path toward what someone like Bill Orcutt would do years later, the raw, spiraling, abstract guitar. The raga was the ancestor. This is the descendant, showing up early.

And then “You Might Ask Me What” stopped me cold. The intro. What on earth is Chriest doing here? I sat there, a guy who’s played bass (and guitar) for over thirty years, thinking, “How is that 4/4?” I’d have sworn it was off-time, floating, landing in all the wrong places. It isn’t. It’s plain four, square as a box. The line is just drawn across the bar crooked, hung off the downbeat so the “one” keeps hiding, and it never once actually breaks the meter, so your body finds the pulse even while your brain swears something’s wrong. That’s harder and cooler than just playing in seven, because odd time announces its own strangeness, and this hides its strangeness inside the most ordinary meter there is.

In my last post, writing about the Pink Album, I went on about time signatures, “Waffle” dropping to 3/4, “J’Nuh” running through 9/8 and 7/8. That was strangeness written into the signature. This is the opposite move, and maybe the deeper one: strangeness smuggled inside standard time, without changing the signature at all. SDRE bent time by switching meters. Lungfish bends it without switching a thing.

And a note on the gang vocals on the outro. There’s a MacKaye in the pile. Not Ian, who produced the record, but his brother Alec, of Faith and Ignition, DC hardcore down to the bone. Which is perfect timing, because it stamps the record’s punk credentials right as I’m about to call it something else entirely.

So then what is all of this, really? Lungfish was advanced art school for punk music. And I mean that specifically, not as a compliment you throw at anything a little arty.

Punk started simple. That was the whole premise: three chords and the truth. Anyone can do it; there’s no gatekeeping virtuosity. But the music didn’t stay there. By Revolution Summer and on into the mid-90s, the stuff I’ve already written about here, Spirit Assembly, SDRE, was anything but simple. And out at the far edge, you had bands making it genuinely thorny, the discordant lurch of Angel Hair, the hardcore math-rock of 1.6 Band or The Crownhate Ruin. So there’s a whole spectrum of complexity in this music, running from three chords to composition.

The mistake with Lungfish, and with Rainbows especially, is to hear it sitting down at the simple end of that spectrum. It isn’t. What Lungfish practices isn’t simplicity. It’s subtraction. And those are not the same thing. Simplicity is never having had more. Subtraction is having everything and grinding it away on purpose, down to the few elements that carry the whole charge.

I’ve been revisiting Leonard Koren’s book On Creating Things Aesthetic, where he lays out making art not as divine inspiration but as a set of intentional operations: combining, reconfiguring, extending, and, crucially, stripping down. He even names repetition itself as one of the operations, which flips the whole monotony complaint on its head. What sounds like a band with one idea is actually a band whose one idea is reduction itself.

Lungfish’s songcraft, on full display here, is a process of aesthetic subtraction, and I’d map it in stages. First, reduction in size: paring the parts down until a song is two chords and a pulse, like ‘Open House.’ Then refinement, grinding away every passage that isn’t load-bearing, which is exactly why that drop-out in ‘Open House’ hits so hard. Then abstraction, the theme boiled down to its concentrate: the riff as mantra, the howl with no words, the voice as pure tone. And finally, disintegration, both in the song and in you. Which is where the subtraction and the séance turn out to be the same thing.

Because here’s what this record actually does to you, and the reason it’s in this series at all. Every album I’ve written up here has taught me something about what music even is. That you can’t hold it. That it’s a time machine. That it keeps handing you things you can’t keep. Rainbows From Atoms teaches a different one: that music can let you disappear.

Not play in the background. That’s easy, any record can be wallpaper. I mean the opposite direction entirely. If you let it, this record doesn’t sink into the background, it lets you sink into the background. You stop being a person listening to an album and become one more element in the loop, and for a few minutes, the whole exhausting machinery of being yourself just powers down. Subtraction, taken all the way to the end, is the self coming apart. Not as loss, but as a merging with everything by letting go of the ego. That is what Higgs was doing to that room in Delaware with his arms in the air. He wasn’t performing at us. He was pulling us under. A séance is a room full of people agreeing to lose themselves together and see what comes through.

Which is a strange thing to want from a punk record, a genre mostly built on the exact opposite. On asserting yourself, planting your feet, screaming I. But it’s in there, in the repetition, in the groove, in Higgs’s slow hands. The record is quietly offering you the chance to not be yourself for the length of a side. To sink in and let go.

Melissa propped a door open. Matt and I barged through it looking for noise and speed and somewhere to belong, all the things a kid wants out of punk. I did not expect one of the bands waiting on the other side to hand me a way to briefly stop existing as me. But that’s the one that stuck. That’s the one I still put on when I need to disappear for a while. And it’s always there, patient, ready to pull me back under. All I have to do is let it.

That’s the third in my ‘perfect punk album’ series. Let me know what you think!

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