Record Review: Unsane – Wreck

Chris Spencers Bloody Hand

You could probably consider Unsane the last true patriarchs of the post hardcore noise rock genre. Because all of the post noise / post whatever bands from back in the day have either split up or split up and reformed with totally different members (Helmet… Lame!) Unsane, however, is an exception, the band was created back in 1989 and they have had the same three members since 1994. Chris Spencer, Dave Curran and Vinnie Signorelli have been destroying each others ear drums for eighteen years. Think about it, you could have conceived a child back then while listening to their second album 1993’s Total Destruction and that baby now 19 years later might be banging some one in the back of a Prius listening to Unsane’s newest Wreck (that’s pure craziness).

I think the band has become more intense as the years have gone by. I noticed this trend when 2005’s Blood Run came out. That album was absolutely brutal, plus the cover was badass (all their album covers are badass). 2007’s Visqueen was equally as menacing and Wreck the bands seventh release is just as burley as their previous six. This new album shows the band mixing it up with different guitar tones, tempos and a few random elements to grab your attention and add to the chaos. You wouldn’t really think of a noise group making superb use of a harmonica, but Unsane has been doing it for a couple of albums now. This time around the harmonica makes its appearance on “No Chance” and as usual it fits into the jam surprisingly well, while still keeping the same face smashing action I’ve grown to love them for. The thing that makes Wreck so consistent and gnarly throughout is the signature overdriven lo-fi pulse pound of Curran and Signorelli. It just melts my musical heart when the rhythm section sounds dirty on albums, it adds that much more intensity – So good! The highlights of the album for me were track two “Decay”  and track six “Ghost” both songs are absolutely bodacious. Shit the whole album is bodacious.

Overall Opinion: I love these guys and I’m glad they keep putting out albums. If you were a fan of Unsane before or haven’t yet discovered their sensuous sounds, Wreck is definitely worth your time. Hopefully, it will have the same effect on you as it did on me and you will want to mate in the back of a car with this album blasting in the background. I am pretty sure I conceived a noise rock baby to carry on the tradition, and hopefully, that baby will grow to fornicate in the back of a Jetson car when the robot version of Unsane puts another album out in 2031.

Here’s a user video for the harmonica jam “No Chance”.