by Jon A

After a short breather, Unsane took up their reign of terror again some three years back to punish the human race for being soft. Going bad since 1989, with album covers showing people decapitated by trains or traffic accidents, and titles like "Body Bomb", "Blood Run", and "Total Destruction", Unsane were initially seen as part of the noise rock scene along with bands like Helmet and Big Black, but along with their label mates Neurosis they are now just as often viewed as fathers to the post-metal scene. That's a lot of furious screaming, tribal drumming, and grinding guitars played by shorthaired guys that appear too smart to be part of what's traditionally conceived as metal - angry man's Tortoise, in a way then, but bereft of jazz. It's noisy and scary and extreme, and if I hadn't seen Unsane live once before, 3 years ago, going into the audience to hug them and chatting between songs about how nice it was to be playing, I wouldn't really have known what to expect from meeting them. Still, finding out they were going to play Stengade 30 just the day before the show, I had to, even if I had nothing prepared for an interview. And sure, drummer Vinnie Signorelli, tattooed from his ankles to the top of his head, towers high and menacing as he paces around the backstage room, but really, these are mellow guys, rolling up joints as I try to find a red thread in the few notes I scribbled down to myself before rushing in.

Vinnie: So what's your shirt say?

LOWCUT: "Defend Christiania".

Vinnie: So what's happening to it. They closed it yet?

LOWCUT: Not yet, not yet, what they're doing instead is normalizing it so as to slowly kill it that way. It's a very sad story.

Vinnie: All the weed stands, are they closed?

LOWCUT: Yes.

Vinnie: What about the venues?

LOWCUT: The venues are still there.

Vinnie: Well, that's a good thing. So what, they wanna put up a mall or something?

LOWCUT: No, really expensive apartments. Normalize it that way. So instead of just closing it, they're sending in combat clad police to patrol the area, make everyone uncomfortable that way, in the hope that eventually the Christianites will give and move out.

Dave: Oh, that's so shitty. We played there many times, as well as here.

LOWCUT: Well, let's fill in some blanks. You reformed, like, 3 years ago?

Chris: Yeah, we kinda just took a break, really, I was out in California, Vinnie started a tattoo shop in Brooklyn, Dave started another band. And then I moved back to New York, and we started again. We just needed a break, I mean, we had been in a van, touring for ages, and, you know, home life was kinda suffering from that.

LOWCUT: I read in a Catalan magazine, Mondo Sonoro, that at the time you were unsure of your status, that you were compairing yourselves to bands like Radiohead, Mars Volta, and the Flaming Lips.

Unsane: [unison] What?!?

LOWCUT: That wasn't in the interview itself, it was highlighted in a box. Where did that come from?

Dave: I don't even know who the fuck Mars Volta are.

Vinnie: What? That never came out of any of our mouths.

LOWCUT: Actually, it was an interview with you, Vinnie.

Vinnie: What?! I never said anything like that. I mean, not that I've not said stupid things before, I probably even said stupider things, but I never said that!

LOWCUT: I think what they might have been going at was that you started out on Matador, which is generally associated with indie, and now you're on Relapse, which is more of a metal label.

Dave: But we were on Relapse even before we stopped, I think we've been with them for something like 8 or 9 years.

Chris: But we were definitely not an indie band when we started, we were a lot harsher than any of the other bands on that label.

Vinnie: So maybe that's where that quote came from, that we didn't belong with those kinds of bands.

LOWCUT: So do you fit in with the other bands on Relapse?

Chris: We haven't really played with that many of them. You see, we've always been pretty independent about who we play with, you know, so we can play with, like, Slayer one day, Neurosis another, and then Guzzard the next.

Vinnie: Yeah, and Mars Volta, whoever the fuck they are.

Chris: I think we're seen as being original, neither metal, nor indie. I think the closest thing we got to anything that we could fit in with was the whole AmRep noise thing, you know.

LOWCUT: Another band that started out on Amphetamine Reptile was Helmet who also recently reformed.

Dave: Yeah, but we were probably a lot closer to the AmRep style, I mean, Helmet evolved into a totally different direction.

Chris: Also that when Helmet came back, it was just Page Hamilton with a bunch of new guys, whereas this is, if not the original band, then at least someone who's been with the band for the majority of its career.

LOWCUT: What I was thinking was that some of the noise bands like yourself that were always seen as neither really metal, nor indie, have now found something of a heritage in screamo and postmetal, so I was wondering if the time was opportune now to come back?

Chris: Well, as I said we've always been really independent, so nobody really cares if the time is right or not. I mean, we're playing great now, never played better.

Dave: We don't really look towards other bands to see what they're doing, you know, we just do what we do, and if people like it then that's fine, and if they don't, that's fine too.

LOWCUT: I saw you play at Loppen on Christiania a few years back, and if I hadn't seen that show, I wouldn't really have known what to expect from meeting you today - I mean, your music is very hard and extreme and you all look like real tough guys, but at that show, in between songs you were out in the audience hugging people and thanking them for coming.

Chris: Well, we're thankful guys! It's like, if that's the way you perceive the world, then it's a great thing to have people like what you do, you know.

Dave: That people share what we feel, that's cool. And it's not like we're violent assholes or anything, you know.

LOWCUT: No, no, no, what I mean is that for a band with a very extreme expression, you seem like very mellow people, so where does that come from?

Dave [holds up a big ball of hashish]: This! [laughs all around]

Chris: It's like, if you have an outlook like this, and get to write records about this stuff and play live every night, and, you know, if you're like that every day, and that's your outlook and you feel like that every day, you just get overwhelmed by it.

Dave: It's like therapy to us.

Chris: Yeah, it's like therapy, to have an outlet for these kinds of frustrations and crap in life that you think sucks; that you can express it, and it actually helps you to get it all out, it actually helps you to, you know, be a little more calm. I mean, if I didn't have this band, I'd probably shoot somebody! [the whole room falls silent] And also - [everybody breaks up laughing] Yeah, sure, I'm the black knight, just torching my way through!

Vinnie: You can quote him on that.

LOWCUT: And I have it on tape, so there's no confusion about what was said or not!

Chris: Nope, that was pretty straightforward!

LOWCUT: Well, about that, shooting people rather than getting I out in therapy, I recall your last show, where you started out with a taped sequence from "Taxi Driver", and in a way, you seem to me to represent the same face of New York; this very -

Chris: Seedy…

LOWCUT: - dark, violent undertow.

Chris: Well, that's a lot of what I've experienced there, to tell you the truth. I drove a cab when the band first started out, and you know. It's cleaned up a lot now, but there are still parts where you can see that, that are pretty nasty, I mean, in Brooklyn or the Bronx, probably a few places up in Harlem, but it's pretty clean now.

Dave: In terms of Manhattan anyway.

Chris: Yeah, in terms of Manhattan and Williamsburg. But that's a lot of what I've seen in life and it doesn't really even have to be in New York, you know. I mean, I have friends in New Orleans who are suffering like animals, too, or friends in San Fransisco that are getting fucked by God! It doesn't really matter where you live, whether it's New York or not, it's just the way life deals out your cards.

Dave: It's not like it comes out of the thin air either, I mean, I lived in a part of New York for a while that was pretty bad, and, you know, you see all this stuff and you just wanna, like, fucking scream about it.

LOWCUT: Also, you got jumped at some point, Chris?

Chris: Yeah, I got jumped in Vienna. I got kicked in the head and the body by 4 or 5 guys and had internal bleedings. I had to go to the hospital where they cut me open from the sternum to the pelvic bone and went through my internal organs. They found a part in my smaller intestine where there was a laceration, so they had to go through all of my intestines as well. That was also part of why we took a break, because we had, like, 6 months of touring within 2 ½ weeks of me being in the hospital, and when I got out I still had this huge scar that when I was singing, it would bleed and shit. It wasn't very healthy.

LOWCUT: One thing that has always struck me as funny is that in Europe, your audience tends to be quite left wing -

Dave: I hope so!

LOWCUT: - and more or less intellectual, but at the same time, your music is very primal. How do these two things fit together?

Chris: Well, we do what we do, we don't think too much about these things. I mean, to me, personally, I like reading books like Bukowski, stuff that's really raw and more realistic to existence than, like, fucking MTV. So maybe the being primal of it is more about looking at things and being realistic about them, not trying to cover things up, and in a way I think that's more intellectual, in a way.

LOWCUT: And you said that you hoped your audience here would be leftwing?

Chris: Yeah, of course, because if you were a rightwinger and you liked this kind of music, you'd be one mean motherfucker, you know what I'm saying?

LOWCUT: But a lot of the NYHC bands are rightwingers, or at least follow some of those sentiments, and you used to be lobbed in with that lot as well?

Chris: Sort of, I mean, we were perceived as a post-hard core band, played some of the same venues like CBGB's, and I never liked any of that crap, you know, all the racism and stupidity and knuckleheads. So a lot of these bands I may have liked, but it was never our intention to be a hard core band. We wanted to make noise that was more urban and more representative of where we come from. And not be part of some music scene, we just wanted to be real and representative of what our lives were about.

LOWCUT: You've been going on since…?

Dave: '89.

LOWCUT: That's 16 years, that's a long time: How do you keep it going?

Chris: I'm the Black Knight, man! I don't know, we love doing it, that's the key to it. When I moved back to New York, I went to Vinnie, and we'd had a break for, like, 3 years, and I asked him if he wanted to get back together, and he said, "Are we gonna have fun?" "Hell yeah!" We're good friends, we like to be around each other, and it's fun. It's fun shit, or we wouldn't be do it. As long as there are people willing to put out our records, I don't see why we wouldn't be doing it. I mean, they may not all sound like this, because there's so much shit that I wanna try doing, like trains screeching and stuff, but if people wanna listen to it, I don't see why Dave, or Vinnie, or I wouldn't be doing this.

So, was that night's show good?
Shit, that word doesn't really fit in when you're talking about Unsane.
I mean, Unsane aren't nice or pleasant or anything like that. Not even just outrageous. Watching, listening to Unsane is about as pleasant an experience as trying to pop a boil on your lower back. Other similar bands like Helmet, Neurosis or our own Psyke Project can be exciting and life-affirming in all their raw glory, Unsane aren't: Unsane are pure fucking hate. Forget black metal, this is hate, disillusion, and misanthropy put to music - big, ugly, noisy music, as it would be. Unsane are everything inherently bad about man. It's not just a cool reference that Unsane used to introduce their shows with the "Taxi Driver" monologue about washing "all the scum of the streets"; the world view of Unsane seems not too far removed from that of Travis Bickle.
It's not a pretty experience, and even if you sort of like the music at some perverse level, you catch yourself thinking that, shit, it can't be that bad - it's not that bad, because if it was, what point would there be in calling yourself humanitarian, voting socialist, making friends?

Thing is, the day after the show I took an evening walk in my neighborhood, and with drunk couples fighting in public, mean-looking pushers patrolling the frontier to Christinia, police in full combat gear harassing the Christianites inside, glue-sniffing teens running amuck on the streets, a naked homeless guy drunk out of his skull begging for food, and some business man doing deals inside a Death Star-looking example of prestigious modern architecture - and all this in less than half an hour, mind you - I started to fear that, shit, maybe Unsane indeed are right, and it's all a useless hellhole. Damn!

"Blood Run" is out on Relapse.