The Unicorns
*** 1/2
"Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?" (Alien8), Indie rock
There's something to be said about the feeling of childish delight, be it from a fresh new pair of kicks, chicken fingers in TDR or a first date. To be so excited about something that it puts a giddy little kick in a step is a rare treat. The most recent reason to feel this excited is British Columbian band the Unicorns, whose Alien8 album "Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?" provides the fine head-nodding, foot-tapping, prance-around-the dorm pop style.
It would be easy to label The Unicorns as any genre that gets tossed around, but there's no denying the truth: The Unicorns deconstruct the pop song - complete with flourishing harmonies, innate keyboards and guitar leads, and an arsenal of "ba-ba-ba-bums" and "oohs" - right down to its foundation. The band consists of Alden Penner, Jaime Tambour and Nick Thorburn, who duel with slight bickering and call-and-response choruses. "I write the songs; no, I write the songs," they chant on "I Was Born (a Unicorn)," the pseudo-macho anthem that served as the show-closer at their recent D.C. stop on the Black Cat backstage.
On first listen, the album is absurd, with lyrics about ghosts, haunted houses and monsters that make critics' heads spin by defying the traditional verse-chorus-verse-chorus pattern. "Ghost Mountain," the infectious third track, about a gang of kids who climb a mountain and run into a ghost (yeah, you wish you had the guts to write it too), plays like a tall tale.
"We weren't welcome, the ghost made that clear, so we stepped back, but it was drawing near," Nick and Alden hum as they recount the story.
In a world of pop songs that promise to "get you naked by the end of this song," something as earnest and puerile as singing about sleeping bags and posters of child stars is refreshing and thought-provoking, leaving you wondering where the metaphor lies, if at all. The expectations for The Unicorns are constantly built up and then torn down by their ability to be offbeat without being trite or goofy. "Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone" convinces you that there's something they know that you don't.
The relationship between The Unicorns and an intrinsic childishness runs deep. They play their instruments like wide-eyed, prodigious children experimenting with some treasure. And they play them well. At The Black Cat show, the versatile musicians tried their hand at every instrument on stage, while maintaining the natural feel that makes their dense sound so accessible. A comfortable, fuzzy noise envelops the entire record, intensifying its dreamlike quality. "Tuff Ghost" breaks into the ear with a keyboard hook so simple yet atmospheric, and "Sea Ghost" opens with a nautical whistle tune - if it isn't a whistle, it's a Moog, electronic trumpet, talking computron or something unidentifiable and inorganic - before it launches into a buzzing refrain, exalting The Unicorns lo-fi aesthetic.
A band that can stir up a certain level of glowing excitement, generate lines of people stretching to the street at the Black Cat on a frigid Sunday night and cause frantic record store searches up and down the Eastern seaboard doesn't come around that often. A band such as The Unicorns, armed with an intuitive touch on the pop world, comes around even less often.
