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WHO WILL CUT OUR HAIR WHEN WE’RE GONE?
(Alien8 Recordings)
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If the title of the Unicorns’ debut sounds like the rallying cry of anxious Pavement fans, so be it: what we’ve got here is the next great slanted-and-enchanted indie-pop moment. A pair of death-obsessed, cut-rate fabulists from Canada, Nicholas "Neil" Diamonds (the slanted one who’s into Silver Apples) and Alden Ginger (the enchanted one who harbors a secret crush on Edith Piaf) combine existential dread and pastel naïveté better than any two-dimensional saga since My Little Pony. Direct quote: "We wrote pop songs and then fucked with them." The tools of their trade include a small army of malfunctioning analog synthesizers, toy pianos, outdated organs, recorder, and accordion. Also: glitchy Casiotone beats, druggy Sgt. Pepper circus marches, and polyester falsettos multi-tracked in off-key harmony. You’d think an album that begins with a song called "I Don’t Wanna Die" and ends with one called "Ready To Die" might be conceptual, novelistic even, but this one’s just symmetrical, even though three song titles mention ghosts. Given their obsession with skewed Beatles hooks and the dank throb of the Velvets, half-trashed keyboards, and the aforementioned ghosts, the Unicorns sound a lot less like the first few Quasi CDs than you’d expect, except on their mid-album hand-on-the-glock(enspiel) rocker "Let’s Get Known." Album’s yuckiest rhyme: "Somewhere in the asshole of my eye/There’s a muscle that relaxes when you cry." Album’s best argument: their themesong, "I Was Born (A Unicorn)," which begins with a calypso lick that can’t decide whether it’s Harry Belafonte’s or Buster Poindexter’s and then deteriorates into the kind of sung dialogue/argument you suspect Lennon and McCartney would’ve recorded if they’d been honest — "I write the songs!" "I write the songs!" "You say I’m doing it wrong!" "You are doing it wrong!" Plus, the CD ends with a parody of Vincent Price’s rap from "Thriller," followed by Diamonds and Ginger baiting each other again: "I’ll stop believing in you"/"If you stop believing in me!" (The Unicorns play the Middle East this Monday, January 12; call 617-864-EAST.)
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