It doesn’t take a genius to notice all the echoes of the 70s in the 90s. Queen and Led Zeppelin have never been more popular, and Neil Young has scored his biggest successes in years by recording two albums that sound exactly like ones he recorded 20 years ago. New bands are also getting in on the trend: Blind Melon sounds an awful lot like the early 70s Grateful Dead, and grunge bands like Tad and the Melvins sound just like Black Sabbath. Unrest, a trio from Washington, D.C., and Stereolab, a Franco-British sextet, share the impulse to borrow from the 70s, but their sources are somewhat less predictable. Both owe a heavy debt to Can, Faust, and Neu, a trio of German bands who were themselves inspired by the Velvet Underground. They spent the 70s developing a style that emphasized trance-inducing grooves and unusual keyboard and guitar textures; the critics dubbed it Krautrock.
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Unrest has been releasing albums since 1988. Their first three records are wildly scattered affairs that feel more like compilations than the work of a single band. Singer-guitarist Mark Robinson and drummer Phil Krauth (bassist Bridget Cross joined the group two years ago) jumped from Kiss covers to disco posturing to fragmented instrumentals to lush Morrissey-style ballads to frantic thrashing punk. A lot of the fun of those early records came from seeing what juxtapositions Robinson would come up with next. Then came their fourth album, 1991’s Imperial f.f.r.r. (the initials stand for “full frequency response recording,” a legend that appeared on early stereo demonstration records and has recently reappeared on ambient-house-music discs). On it Unrest strung together with surprising coherence a disparate array of smooth pop songs, jittery high-velocity rockers, churning noise experiments, glacially paced ballads, and funky instrumentals. It hung together in large part because each song was built on a pulsing rhythmic foundation reminiscent of those old Krautrock bands; even when the drums and bass were absent, the pulse was always there.
Perfect Teeth, the group’s new album on Warner Bros. subsidiary 4AD, is an uneven shadow-boxing match with the expectations that burden a band debuting on a major label. It’s heavily weighted toward conventional pop songs, which have always been part of the Unrest oeuvre but never the whole story. Robinson counts down the chorus of “Six Layer Cake” (“Six five four three two one layer cake”) with a boyish enthusiasm, and his brisk rhythm guitar on “So Sick” buoys a hook as sweet and fluffy as cotton candy. “West Coast Love Affair,” a showcase for Krauth’s mellow croon, and “Angel I’ll Walk You Home,” a prayerful ballad featuring lush harmonies sung by Cross and Robinson, have a breathy lilt reminiscent of Dionne Warwick. The best pop songs work fine, but the band’s efforts to be adventurous break the seamless rhythmic flow that made Imperial f.f.r.r. so satisfying. Several long, meandering tracks that strive to be challenging are merely annoying. But Robinson has always had good instincts about which songs work well onstage, so there was reason to expect a strong performance at Metro.
Unrest’s performance, on the other hand, could be summed up in one word: short. They only played 40 minutes, rushing through each song like they’d rather be playing the next one. This high-energy approach worked on the faster numbers (drawn mostly from Perfect Teeth and Imperial f.f.r.r.) but threatened to pull apart the more relaxed “West Coast Love Affair.” The set’s length may have been due to an equipment shortage, though. Robinson broke one guitar string halfway through the set and never replaced it. Perhaps he lacked replacement strings or a second guitar. At any rate, the show ended shortly after he broke another string.
