TS: interpol vs unrest

Interpol in total are decent musicians with above average song writing skills.

Mark Robinson is one of the best rhythm guitar players of the late 80's/early 90's and also one of the best songwriters in pop history.

Mark Robinson alone whoops all their asses combined. We don't even need to bring up Bridgette Cross and the mighty indie-drum thunder that is known the world over as Phil Krauth.

Perfect Teeth was not only an antidote to that but an advancement on it. It was entirely clean-lined: Robinson's big guitar blasts pretty much lacked distortion -- in America! in 1993! -- and instead gave us that frantic sped-up jangle that's distinctively his contribution to the lexicon. The record was also spacious, and spacey. At the point Stereolab was still working its wall-of-sound drone, but a lot of the tiny blip-tone melodies Unrest were constructing pointed ahead to the stuff Stereolab would be doing during a much later phase of their career -- the backing vocals at the end of "Angel I Will Walk You Home," for instance, this sort of concrete tone-placement approach that's all over the record. They managed to turn the foreground of their music into something like a Mondrian painting, the clean-lined blocks of particular tones, in a way that seemed to turn away from most of the other things going on at the time, and the sort of techy spaciness of those tones combined with Robinson's vague leaning toward some image of a 50s-style pop combo to create and probably surpass what would, four or five years later, become a major theme in indie internationally, even though no one connected that with anything Unrest had been doing.

It seemed cleaner and spacier and more friendly and cerebral than the highly-emotive rock idiom of the moment, and more bedroomy, and more personal: "Back when I was twenty / I didn't think anyone liked me." And it managed to set all of its most fascinating impulses in context: it functioned terrifically as a rock album, as a pop album, and as an "experimental" album. Which is, I think, a lot of why it gets praised so often, but also a lot of why it gets slated as a run-of-mill record: it certainly seems continuous with most of what else was going on at the time, but really it's quite difficult to come up with anyone else who sounded quite like them, or even anyone else who's particularly followed the techniques that were actually uniquely theirs.

-- nabisco (--...), August 27th, 2002. (nabisco)

Nitsuh = super on the money

I can't speak for everybody, but I don't live under a rock.

Oh, they didn't always play jangly pop tunes. Listen to the track "Malcolm X Park" - that mofo will fuck your shit up with its fuck-shit machine. Or "Black Power Dynamo"...or...

You should watch one of the Interpol interviews they have on their website. They try and come off like they are artsy and deep, but they are just three really dumb, beer drinking, rock guys and poor foppish Carlos. Their music is painted with heavy-handed overly broad brush strokes and it lacks the spark of intelligence and subtlety that comes through in all of the best Unrest songs.

I knew somebody & probably Ned was gonna say this but I didn't expect it'd be Ned, Immediately! But look, no, of course not, Smiths Coctaues Prefab etc. to thread, but my complaint with Unrest has to do with what I take to be a misunderstanding on their part of what Factory Records was all about. It's like Unrest are aping aesthetic positions that they haven't actually got their heads around. I have Malcolm X Park - eh. That's all I got to say is "eh." O yeah & I met the guys from Interpol and they're nice guys, being interviewed and not looking dumb & self-important is kinda tricky.

Well, of course they were! Aesthetic positioning is certainly (and admirably!) a big part of Unrest & Teenbeat's whole deal!

Is that the question we're answering? If so, Interpol can have it.

If we're answering the question "Which is the better band?" then god, it's Unrest, no contest.

I get the feeling we're talking about one of your favorite bands ever, though, so, like, y'know, keep on keepin' on, etc. - for me, Nabisco nails it here: "It seemed cleaner and spacier and more friendly and cerebral than the highly-emotive rock idiom of the moment" - "highly-emotive" is generally my preferred side of the street, and Interpol speaks to my inner goth. Without actually being goth. (Also, the Factory comparison for Interpol, as I've said elsewhere, is lazy journalism, there are a gazillion bands who sound more like Joy Division than Interpol.)

The Interpol Guy Ate My Balls!

Er, anyway.

The whole idea of the Factory Records pose filtered through American eyes is that everything and anything on Factory was delicate waif/broody goth music made by poets, even when it was perfectly clear that most of the bands were in fact good time folks out for a laugh and a drink and a song. Joy Division/New Order were practically lager lads (er, plus Gillian) for a start, and so on down the way -- the Stockholm Monsters were definitely not shrinking violets, Crispy Ambulance fairly bullheaded, etc. Even Miaow weren't wimps per se, as the booklet in the CD reissue, written by Cath Carroll herself, makes clear -- plenty of stories about dealing with London squats and rough conditions. The Happy Mondays should have buried the vision entirely but by that time the impression was perfectly clear, and the end point was that the musicians (and the music) sure as hell did have 'balls' if you must, but were able to express it in a way that was at once straightforward and abstract -- nobody on Factory needed to be Motorhead musically. About the only one who might have fit the stereotype was Vini Reilly, and he's still amiable and not precious, really.

But again, filter it down to America through all this, and who gets attracted to the music? Only New Order ever made it over here in a mainstream sense and even then it was almost through the back door (but they did do it, on MTV and filling outdoor arenas and everything). Otherwise there's all this Mysterious Music filtering over, odd random pressing with FAC logos and striking design and all that. Plenty of import press mentions and stereotypes and strange names. And thus flocks the cryptic youths to them who think that Bon Jovi sucks and that the Replacements are all right but you know maybe not arty enough and anyway.

That explains Mark E. Robinson easily enough, I'd say. It's a misapprehension perhaps, of label and sound strictly and solely as art project, but it's a misapprehension that is logical and pointed, because that's what happens with music. The circumstances of its creation and the intention of its creators, as Jess noted in the Radiohead round table thread, mean nothing to the listener who hears, interprets the signs and symbols around it and makes its own conclusion. And perhaps more to the point, it's that seeming misapprehension that MAKES Unrest so much more of a band than Interpol.

Interpol is a connect-the-dots here-to-here combination of Good Sources. It pushes buttons very directly. That's often a good and wonderful thing in music and in life, because it's the whole idea of 'hey, combine this with this with this, my god! this is GREAT!' creation. To deny the appeal of that approach would be to deny the impulse of art in general. Unrest -- and by extension Teenbeat, much more so than Interpol is vis-a-vis Matador, who as a label do not have an intentional uniform aesthetic beyond the whole 'All Wrongs Reversed' joke on every disc (nothing wrong with that, I should note) -- was about writing the whole Tony Wilson 'label as art project as life' vision onto different ground, about following a random dream to see where it leads, of developing something inspired by but parallel with. For all that Unrest did its Factory Records tribute, for all the Peter Saville/Teenbeat Graphica parallels, for all the use of catalog number as fetish approaches, Unrest were and Teenbeat are not out to recreate or emulate but reaim and relaunch and see what happens. They are Factory without a Hacienda, head divorced from body, yeah, may well be 'no balls' -- but they try more and succeed more thoroughly as a result, and it works more, for me at least, than saying, "Dude, what if we rocked...with a DIGITAL DELAY PEDAL?"

Still, NorthWest England does seem to be reference point.

I'm not taking sides, as I don't know Unrest well enough and I don't think Factory-cloning is really Interpol's schtick. Just pointing out it's a false dichotomy, this thread.

But, out of interest: if I like all the above-mentioned bands (including Interpol, whose album I quite like), would I like Unrest?

I haven't felt the need to listen to Unrest in about eight years.

"Make Out Club"
"Disko Magic"
"Cath Carroll"
"Isabel (Remix)"
"Can't Sit Still (either version)"
"Suki"
"June"
"She Makes Me Shake Like A Soul Machine"

It's like saying "Apoptygma Berzerk vs. Rammstein.. the better Wax Trax! ripoff?", when both bands are just barely tangentially similar to anything on the label...

Even then, the only Factory record that you can clearly say birthed Unrest is James' "Village Fire" EP.. and maybe Miaow? As for Interpol.. well, maybe Joy Division.. kinda?