Unrest Classic or Dud?

One of the best double-bills I've ever attended: Unrest & Stereolab in '93 @ St. Andrews Hall in Detroit - touring for Perfect Teeth & TRNBWA respectively.

Caught that bill out here at UC Irvine, with Idaho opening. Hell of a triple bill.

idaho, unrest and stereolab in one concert? why wasn't i there?

xxp - have we been through this before, henry s? I think we were probably at a lot of the same shows.

I think we both piled on some thread about Detroit venues, or St. Andrews Hall, or something like that...(I live in Boston now, but am from the D, and went to a ton of shows there in the 80's and 90's)...

Got my tickets to the NYC show!

^^^jealous

one of the few bands I would be excited to see a reunion performance by (the other one was Camper Van Beethoven)

Gotta buy my plane tickets next!

Would killllllllllllllll to see that.

Brooklyn show sold out!

Come to Hoboken, people.

http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2010/07/02/mark_robinson_and_his_little_teenbeat_label_celebrate_a_big_legacy_and_a_26th_anniversary/

huh, a designer for Houghton Mifflin

I love that he writes hand-written notes for mail orders (I got one for that Maybe It's Reno CD)

will anyone be at the Friday 7/9 show in Brooklyn?

man i was so disappointed at that maybe it's reno album :\

really? I thought a lot of it was very much of a piece with Perfect Teeth

Yeah, maybe it's reno is great. Takes a few listens to kick in.

I love that he writes hand-written notes for mail orders

Hah, yeah! I only ever ordered from Teenbeat once, got Vomit Launch & No Trend CDs because they were impossible to find here, and got a note from "Mark" I did wonder if it was really him ; )

3 versions of Unrest were great in DC tonight ( Versus were as well; and Rondelles weren't bad....Missed the first band...Jonny Cohen in between band was well Jonny). Unrest did "Cath Carroll", "Teenage Suicide," "Suki," "Makeout Club" and many more. Mark's got that wonderful boyish grin as he strums away and sings.

Unrest were great in Hoboken.

a crucial influence on the transition of american indie aesthetics from B&W photocopies of skulls to colour photocopies of 70's airport lounges.

― fritz, Monday, February 18, 2002 5:00 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark

all time 2nd response HOF

Pals of mine who dj'd at the University of Maryland's WMUC and who hung out with Robinson in the mid to late 80s and early 90s shared Mark's interest in Factory Records. While such interest may not have been prominent as a musical theme in America at the time, it was not necessarily unusual.

Mark's lost a ton of weight.

I had not seen him in so long, I missed the heavy phase.

I was trying to determine the best Unrest record.

the first one a little too juvenalia for my tastes, and perfect teeth never did it for me. a noble failure.

that leaves malcolm x park, kustom karnal, imperial. kustom karnal is great, but a little too genre-bound. imperial has their best songs, but

malcolm x park is their best record.

the pre-Imperial stuff I've heard seems half-formed to me. don't think I've ever listened to Malcolm X Park tho

you should check it out.

"pop" song highlights-- redo of can't sit still from their first lp. ]Christina, which is a tribute to lawrence hayward vox.

other highlights-- lucifer rising not sure if this references beausoleil/jimmy page origins, but it is fab. raucous cover of kiss' Strutter. Elvis Presley cover. Cramps-informed rockabilly workout. eloquent piano instrumental, recalling vin guaraldi high on lucy shwag, mondrian.

a brilliant mix of self-indulgence and hitting just the right notes for the crowd at each prompting to change over the record. i think large part involved regurgitating influences in a compelling way and not being confined by genre.

one of the best shows i ever saw involved a capella rendition of lord shiva from kustom karnal with his bandmates looking on like "ugh, i'm so embarrassed"

a brilliant mix of self-indulgence and hitting just the right notes for the crowd at each prompting to change over the record.

funny, i can't parse that sentence either.

what i mean, is after each song when you might be tempted to be "ugh", the next track totally switches gears.

i think their eclecticism played a large part in their genius. other big names falling under indie rock from that period, pavement, superchunk, whatever seem so stifled in comparison

can't get past how ugly the sleeve is tbh. from Imperial on all their stuff looks SO great.

yeah, maybe not the best artwork choice ever. i try not to pay too much attention to that stuff. i mean, "unrest" is sort of a ridiculous name for a band.

i agree, though. imperial + the singles around that time, bavarian mods, skinhead girl, etc., are perfect-looking

also, you should check out "headringer" from twister cassette. great early unrest song, man

if you like stuttering epiphones

Drummer Phil Krauth is now my son's English teacher. They had some tough essays on Crime & Punishment.

!!

that's so cool

yes!

Just realized after 15 years of looking at them that the sleeve photos of B.P.M (1991-1994) are Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls (I've hung out on that overhang!), where Simon Le Bon stopped by and passively watched the band recording long enough to get a joke "producer" credit on Perfect Teeth. That album's first two songs sure stand up as something else (and very Duran Duran), I gotta say.

have always wondered about that LeBon credit

yeah, me too!!

man "angel i will walk you home" is one hell of a song. the fast-strummy stuff is pretty obv the (deserving) focus of their late-oeuvre, but i looooove the slow pretty stuff a lot, too.

^^

never got all that much into malcolm x, but when i first heard it i was a huge imperial head so maybe i'd feel differently about it now

can't get past how ugly the sleeve is tbh. from Imperial on all their stuff looks SO great.

from imperial on their stuff looks great. and uptight, anal, entirely defined by conventional (mid-to-late 20th century) thinking about "good design" and "good taste".

malcolm X park cover art seems to come from a mirror universe wr2 those buttoned-down aesthetics. raw, sloppy, deliberately ugly, crude, badly designed. somewhat appealing on that level, and representative of the messy, homemade, splattery music within.

as a record, i can't go with malcolm x park as their best. think they were still defining themselves at that point, working to find an individual voice within a whirl of then-current punk, post-punk, art & indie influences. the follow-up, kustom karnal blaxploitation, seemed like an attempt to align themselves with the likes of sonic youth (creepy tunings, "rock" posturing, dark subject matter), and a triumph within the band of their prog over their pop tendencies, but it's a failure, and a brilliant one in that they were so quickly able to learn from it. boring as it may be to say, imperial still stands as their masterpiece. it's their sound, not an approximation of anyone else's, and it never falters, doubts itself, breaks stride.

great post. let me think about this.

yeah, i think kustom karnal is brilliant, defiantly so, maybe

as i said above, i think imperial is the best song-wise. during that time i was blown away by their singles run of cherry, skinhead girl, factory tribute, bavarian mods. maybe i'm just a sucker for contrarianism, but i loved that they went directly from kustom karnal to jangly pop songs. kinda like writing a sparkly almost radio-ready song like skinhead girl but dousing it in four-letter words, provocative subject matter

think i like mxp so much b/c it is brash in a clueless first album sort of way...enthusiasm trumping everything. lots of confidence, too many ideas. i realize it's not their first lp, but it has that vibe almost. and i feel like it's aged really well. 'fuck pussy galore' or whatever it's called is something of a mess, kustom feels strangulated somehow and maybe too much of a pose, imperial for all of its greatness sounds thin to me sometimes, and i never really got into p. teeth.

entirely defined by conventional (mid-to-late 20th century) thinking about "good design" and "good taste".

yeah, especially the cover of the animal park 7"!

well, almost entirely ;D

imperial ffrr is nice for a hot summer day

Yes.

Drummer Phil Krauth is now my son's English teacher. They had some tough essays on Crime & Punishment.

― curmudgeon, Monday, September 20, 2010 7:19 PM

He was a hard but fair 11th grade English teacher. A "B" for the year in an IB English class is not bad. I do not know if Mr. Krauth finds any time to drum these days.

I hope so! love his drumming

love everything about this band, really

did you lot hear the version of hydroplane that was on the recent codeine box?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXiV6vOjqB4

actually i'm making the assumption here that hydroplane was an unrest original or am i wrong?

indeed it is