Unsane "Visqueen" (Ipecac)
By
Friday. May 11, 12:01 AM
Non-noise rock from a noise rock band.

No one ever fails to mention “noise” as the mot de rigueur when writing/talking about legendary New York trio Unsane. I guess that would have been the case a few years ago, way before all that shit started happening to them. For those who don’t know, these middle-aged rockers have been through some tough times, none of which I am about to recount in this review, except the one where our man guitarist/vocalist Chris Spencer gets jumped by four people while in Vienna (that’s in Austria for the geographically challenged) and winds up in the hospital with internal bleeding. That incident forced them to take 2000 off, but the band has been back since, namely with 2003’s Lambhouse and 2005’s Blood Run. Some of you may also remember the band for its crude video for the Occupational Hazard track “Scrape,” which with a meager budget of $200 managed to land on the teenage screens of MTV and single-handedly may have caused some massive barfing across the nation.

Needless to say, Visqueen is awesome. Read some mixed reviews here and there, but what jumps out the most is this record’s inner beauty. Had Unsane never been tagged as “noise,” it'd be easy and fair to just lump them with the very broad genre of post-hardcore, which by the way includes plenty of non-definable bands. I am enamored with the bass tone, which is as prominent as the guitars and contain not only plenty of aggressiveness but also transmit loads of emotion. Albeit all negative ones.

Even better, Visqueen is even: solid from beginning to end with an excellent balance of hooks, rudeness, and nastiness. It embodies many of the qualities mostly absent in noise rock. It is catchy in a subtle way; “subtle” being an adjective that perhaps has never been attached to a band like Unsane. But that’s the point I was trying to get across: Visqueen, and the Unsane of today, is perhaps too complex of a unit to still be lumped in the noise genre. No disrespect to anyone, but this is too musical. If not, how can you explain my tapping foot to the chaotic beat of Visqueen?
www.theunsane.com
www.ipecac.com

Hansel Merchor

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