In praise of Unsane: Consistency, commitment and the craft of catharsis

"When you establish a consistent body of work it makes its own reality, and there's no way it can be put down or put up; it becomes something that exists for human beings, a body of musics that will help people on the planet. I'm attracted to that, I always have been — as opposed to the concept of the 'great night.' Like, wow, this guy had a great night — one great night in twelve years! [Laughs.] That doesn't excite me. I'm interested in looking at the continuity of a person's involvement, and I draw strength from that ... because it really is about a life's commitment." —Anthony Braxton, Forces in Motion

We're getting to the end of the year, which means reckoning with all the music that's come out since January, taking stock, making lists. A worthy exercise, or at least a fun one. But it's secondary to how music happens to me these days, and has for a long time. More and more these days, I'm on the lookout for "a consistent body of work" that "makes its own reality," a big chunk of product that I can live with, pick up, put down, revisit, sink into, just sort of reveling in how much is there.

The band Unsane put out a new record a couple months ago, their eighth since 1991. The highest praise I could give it would be to say that it's a new Unsane record. In a world such as this, the mere act of carrying on, sticking to it, keeping the lights on, etc., in any artistic endeavor is admirable. But there's something I find especially attractive about the specific quality of Unsane's longevity, the way the "continuity of [their] involvement" manifests.

An art project like Unsane is extremely easy to underestimate. I myself did just that for years. Much like Obituary, another band that has provided me with untold hours of enjoyment and inspiration in recent years (per Andrew W.K.: "... to be able to turn to that no matter what state I'm in and have it instantly take me to this place of pure physical euphoric energy, it's one of the things I'm most thankful for in life, it's like water or food to me, it feeds my soul in a very fundamental way"), Unsane was, in my teenage years, a band I liked, full stop. I think I placed a value judgment on their simplicity, their dogged macro-level sameness, and back then, when I seemed to more invested in a hierarchical way of thinking about music, I likely would have viewed them as second-rate within the larger post-hardcore universe I was immersed in at the time (i.e., a lesser entity than, say, craw or the Jesus Lizard).

But, and again Obituary are a great example of same, musical tortoises like this will often surprise you. Suddenly 20 years have gone by, the larger scene has vanished or at the very least transformed drastically, and a band like Unsane look like not merely survivors, but titans. There is, without question, something to this idea of the life's commitment, and that really home for me when seeing Unsane live at Saint Vitus last week. I love seeing all kinds of music in all kinds of settings, but to me, there's something essentially holy about the transcendent club show, and the band that thrives in that environment. To say that Unsane do just that would, again, be selling them short. An Unsane club show is an essentially perfect musical event: an expulsion of negative energy, embodied in vocalist-guitarist Chris Spencer's rage-meets-rue shout-cry (I think of Ian Christe's description, in his Rolling Stone Greatest Metal Albums of All Time entry on Converge's Jane Doe, of Jacob Bannon as sounding like "a small animal caught in a terrible machine"; both men draw on wounded emotionalism as much as seething anger), accompanied by a sort of full-body clench and piercing blue-eyed stare, in drummer Vinny Signorelli's mean, minimal finesse, in bassist Dave Curran's sturdy conveyance of the songs' massive, loping weight, that paradoxically brings about euphoric delight. Watching them, I couldn't stop grinning.

The band aspires to nothing more than to play these types of songs (minimalist noise-blues mantras like "Sick"; demented-drag-race hellrides like "Over Me"; greasy, Curran-sung gutter-rawk stompers like "Aberration," from the new Sterilize; tortured, haunting dirges like "Only Pain"; grinding, nihilistic exercises in musical masochism like "Get Off My Back"; and so on) in these kinds of environments. They get up there, completely own the room by simply doing what they do, incredibly well, get offstage, move on to the next city, repeat. Like so:


The truth is that, as consistent as their aesthetic is, there's a ton of variety and nuance in their work. Spencer's trademark vise-like manhandling of his guitar body, a kind of poor man's whammy-bar effect; his deft slide work; the piercing, sinister melodies he layers over the band's lumbering grooves — all are evidence of a master craftsman's attention to detail. Ditto the way Signorelli and Curran inject their vamps with just the right amount of funk so that they go down harsh but somehow smooth at the same time. Contrasts in tempos and time signatures, subtle shades of the band's primary emotional colors.

What I find so fascinating about this band, and their ongoing project, is that you have the sort of external trappings and mythology of what they do (the blood-soaked album covers; the sordid, oft-recited past complete with drug addiction and even death; the association with the Mean Streets of the early '90s East Village / Alphabet City; even their blocky, all-caps logo), playing into the "one idea, three ways" concept of a holistic image/presentation/vibe. It's all so easy to caricature, to underestimate, to wave off with a "yeah, yeah, I get it." (I myself couldn't resist riffing on how out-of-date Unsane's portrayal of NYC's filthy underbelly seems in the age of rampant gentrification, when I reviewed their 2012 album, Wreck.) But you see them up there on that club stage, sounding and looking the very opposite of tired, played out, obsolete. Make no mistake, for all of their music's tough-guy affect, these guys are having the time of their lives, reveling in the craft of catharsis, relishing the micro-refinements of their deceptively humble art. I know firsthand that playing heavy music is lifegiving, and you can clearly see and sense Unsane drinking deep from that fountain of youth at their shows.

And so yes, best albums of the year, yadda-yadda. In the end, whatever has gone down musically in the past 12 months, and that includes a lot of great stuff, really just amounts to a "great night." Albums, ideally, are just milestones along the way, evidence of a life's commitment in progress, reminders to look at the body of work in its entirety. Every time Unsane puts out a new album, I'm prompted to load up my iPod with all the others, trawling backward and forward and backward and forward through the evidence of their deep, enduring commitment. The kind of work that's easy to miss until you stand back, years later, and really take it all in. Thank God for the lifers, the ones who just keep at it, slowly amassing "a body of musics that will help people on the planet." Goddamn right, it will, and may it ever be so.

Here are 10 Unsane songs I love. (I wholeheartedly recommend all their albums, especially the ones from 1995's Scattered, Smothered and Covered up through the present.) Play painfully loud, obviously.