Unrest Classic or Dud?

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

phew! far too good a song to waste on a b-side imo

I jammed the 33-minute "Hydro" the other day, it RULED. Love this band so much, I kinda want to be a completist but it is expen$$$ive.

I totally love their cover of "God Gave Rock and Roll To You". After being blown away by that in the early 90s I picked up Perfect Teeth and never really got into it. But that one cover was amazing.

― Euler, Saturday, March 15, 2008 6:07 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Never even heard of that. What is it on?

http://www.discogs.com/Unrest-Bavarian-Mods-And-Other-Hits/master/270879

it is so good, and I wish I could find a lyric sheet because I just hear fragments of pleas and regrets and memories ("I found my mailbox full of you", what a lovely line) and I want to get a better understanding of what's falling apart and how. I think I understand what rock and roll has to do with it though.

so good

Retrospective piece in the Post today about Unrest, mostly the Imperial-to-breakup phase: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/dcs-indie-music-scene-thrived-in-the-90s-a-look-back-with-one-of-its-most-beloved-acts/2018/01/02/7f4611be-dc45-11e7-b1a8-62589434a581_story.html

https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_1484w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2018/01/02/Magazine/Images/Unrest-Knoxville_199201_byMarkRobinson.JPG

Not sure how I never managed to post in this thread. Total classic & much missed.

It was an unexpected thrill to hear them on the radio the other day. The Current played "Make Out Club."

I was listening to the Isabel Bishop EP last night and realized how great the funkier version of "Isabel" is.

Haven't heard the EP is a couple decades but how far from the original with the "Ashley's Roachclip" drum break added is it?

iirc the EP version is the same as the "Isabel Bishop" 7" - only the version on Imperial is drumless

I want a Mark Robinson/Unrest anthology...

god i love this band

Same!!

perfect teeth was so great, what a way to go off into the sunset

love

Any Air Miami fans?

Tomas MacLoughlin
8 years ago
the drummer, phil krauth is my English teacher!!!
how cool is that??

xp Mike Fellow is no Phil Krauth, but Air Miami are OK. Never clicked with them the same way.

Not to brag but I saw Unrest at Maxwells and The Ropers were the openers...

...in 2010

I kinda want to be a completist but it is expen$$$ive.

― sleeve, Wednesday, February 27, 2013

five years later, the only formal Unrest releases I'm still missing are the "Make Out Club" 7" and the split tape with Dust Devils, but then there are a bunch of impossible-to-find Teenbeat cassette compilations as well.

Were you really finding it expensive at the time? None of my Unrest records are worth that much money. I don't see a lot of interest in Unrest these days in general. I'm wondering if they will be "rediscovered" by p4k or someone and have their classic status affirmed a little more among the general public someday.

the really expensive one that I still don't have is the UK LP release of Perfect Teeth, it's like $80 or more

Make Out Club single is > $20 and I just can't justify it since I have all the tracks already afaik

most of this stuff is pretty affordable, I think I had to spend $40-50 on the 1st LP original

This one? https://www.discogs.com/Unrest-Perfect-Teeth/release/1622164

yes, trying to find a copy for sale in the US is very difficult

Based on that marketplace, Germany is hoarding all of them!

Any Air Miami fans?

*raises hand

tbh I bought the Air Miami CD because I saw it 2nd hand for about £2.50 some time in the 90s because of the Unrest connection, listened to it a couple of times but didn't think that much of it. A few years later when I first started talking to my now-wife about music she was a fan (of both bands) and sent me a copy of their demo and got me to listen to the album again, and that time it clicked for me.

Any Cotton Candy fans?

me otm 16 years ago about flin flon and ESPECIALLY about panax's "the garden" (from the 2000 teanbeat sampler):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiP1U1DIcMM

when i was a kid in dc the teenbeat stuff felt a lot less cliquish than the dischord post hardcore cool guys and a lot more stylish than the theater dork pukka shell stylings of the dismemberment plan.

yes, trying to find a copy for sale in the US is very difficult

sleeve, i will keep an eye open for that one for you

<3 thank you!

Oh my god, I Do Believe You Are Blushing, where have you been? Apart from, of course, on my shelf for the last decade, unlistened.

Where do I go after Imperial ffrr?

Perfect Teeth, immediately :)

and then BPM