Recent selected press and media coverage of the Atomic Platters project:

Vanity Fair: Apocalyptic Beat - Music That Made Us Think

Nick Tosches reviewed ATOMIC PLATTERS: Cold War Music from the Golden Age of Homeland Security in the December issue of Vanity Fair.

"The War on Terror is no fun. It has brought us nothing but fear and repression. The Cold War was different. It brought fear of another kind: flamboyant paranoia. Armageddon seemed inevitable, but there was also a party going on, fueled by a new and exhilerating sense of freedom. Atomic Platters: Cold War Music from the Golden Age of Homeland Security brings together on 5 CDs more than a hundred recordings from 1945 through 1969. Encountered here–amid a slew os pop. blues, country, rhythm and blues, gospel, rock'n'roll, and incredible junk–are Homer Harris's "Atomic Bomb Blues," with Muddy Waters on guiter (1946), Doris Day's "Tic, Tic, Tic" (1949) and Bo Diddley's "Mr. Khrushchev" (1962). The unexpected pleasures are many. "You make me radioactive all in my knees," sings Fay Simmons seductively in "You Hit Me Baby Like an Atomic Bomb" (1954). More than two dozen civil defense spots (by Tony Bennett, Pat Boone, Boris Karloff, Groucho Marx, and others) are scattered throughout. This is history as it should be: a dance of laughter in the dark, the eternal lesson that fear and repression will not deliver us. Nor will advice from Connie Francis to keep an emergency supply of food and water in case of nuclear attack."

Los Angeles Times: The Bomb Is Da Bomb

Pulitzer prize winner Dan Neil reviewed ATOMIC PLATTERS: Cold War Music from the Golden Age of Homeland Security in last Sunday's (10/30/2005) Los Angeles Times Magazine (latimes.com date 10/28/2005). Neil's weekly 800 Words column looks at arts and pop culture and the connections between "high and low, avant-garde and old guard, ancient and modern."

"This and many more moments of ironic fallout are included in "Atomic Platters: Cold War Music from the Golden Age of Homeland Security,"a darkly amusing collection of songs, civil defense messages and short films about the commie bomb. Assembled by the preservationists of Conelrad.com... "Atomic Platters" takes us to a zany yet oddly familiar land of galloping paranoia, where shadows are etched in concrete and happiness is a warm bomb shelter."

"With the bombing of Japan not so far in the background, a lot of this stuff seems barbarously insensitive, or at least in bad taste, but the American public saw things differently. "The media of the day was very successful portraying the bomb as some kind of silver bullet that ended the war early," says Conelrad co-founder and editor Bill Geerhart. "The bomb was seen as a saving grace."

"Atomic Platters" maintains its bemused distance, preferring to focus on curiosities of the save-the-hat variety. "We don't dwell on the polemics of the bomb," says Geerhart. "We're simply trying to preserve the pop culture impressions left by the bomb."

See the Los Angeles Times for the complete article: 800 Words: The Bomb Is Da Bomb

Newsweek: Nothing to Do But Duck, Cover and Sing

Newsweek's Nick Summers reviewed ATOMIC PLATTERS: Cold War Music from the Golden Age of Homeland Security for this week's (8/15/2005) print and Internet editions.

"And that jazzy, '50s love song—did the singer really ooze "Want to hug and kiss you and give you a squeeze/You make me radioactive all in my knees"? That's how you listen to "Atomic Platters: Cold War Music From the Golden Age of Homeland Security"—in stunned, can-you-believe-this-is-real silence... The tracks range from upbeat novelties ("Atomic Cocktail" by the Slim Gaillard Quartette) to acid satires (Sheldon Allman's "Crawl Out Through the Fallout"). Taken together, they show a society constantly reminded about annihilation. "We wanted to capture the cultural fallout from the bomb," says co-producer Bill Geerhart."

See NEWSWEEK for the complete article: Cold War: Nothing to Do But Duck, Cover and Sing

For more recent CONELRAD and ATOMIC PLATTERS coverage visit our Press & Media section.