Shuteye Unison

• Author: None
• Published: Thursday, March 05, 2009
  
  

• untitled
  (Parks and Records; 2008)
  
  

  Anyone who has spent any time trying to be a "working" musician by writing, recording, and selling an album has been told this basic nugget of music biz wisdom by a number of industry insiders: If you want your album to get noticed, you gotta have your best material up front. You gotta immediately grab the record label intern's attention, or the reviewer's attention, or they aren't going to listen past the first 15 seconds.

   

  Of course, plenty of bands violate this conventional wisdom every day, and many of them still get plenty of attention. At this point, there's nothing revolutionary about, say, starting your album with a minute and 49 seconds of swelling ambient noise. That point notwithstanding, it still takes a certain amount of dedication to your particular artistic vision to buck the industry's prescriptions and just do your own thing. After all, many, many (dare I say the vast majority?) of musicians are mostly in it for the attention and the fame and money they're hoping will follow that attention, and are therefore only too happy to tailor their sound to whatever helps them "make it" in the music biz.

   

  So when I got Shuteye Unison's untitled debut EP in the mail and tossed it in my CD player, you could definitely say I was a little shocked when, somewhere around the 30 second mark, I realized these guys were taking their time, letting the ambient noise get good and swollen, before launching into the first song proper. By the 1:49 mark, I was duly impressed. Not because I was blown away by their novel sound or anything, but because this opening track says to me, "We are artists first and foremost." 

   

  The question now, of course, is: Did the rest of the album deliver on the art?

   

  Yes indeed, Shuteye Unison delivers. Of the six tracks in total, the opener is the only one composed entirely of ambient noise. The rest of the songs defintely have an atmoshperic quality, and there are several interludes that resort to the pure noise. But the songs are more properly described as a sort of indie psychedelic pop rock.

   

  After the minute and 49 seconds of ambience that opens the album, "Tomorrow's Five Horizons" seems to charge right out of the gate - though of course I mean that in relative terms. A driving bass lick starts it off, and I love how it just comes bubbling up out of the noise. Then the chiming, reverb-soaked guitars come in, and the somehow simultaneously soaring but whispery vocals take over. It all has a rather sublime feel. Even when it's at its most hard charging, there's a sense of detachment, an awareness of something larger than the exigencies of this song, like these aren't even songs at all but indie psych pop dispatches from some astral plane.

   

  

  The intro to "Fields Landing" brings the tempo back down to a crawl and imports some samples of a dude talking, too, a nice touch. It lends an experimental feel to this brief interlude before, once again, the reverb-drenched guitars come in, this time with a crunchiness that adds a satisfying heft to the song. As the tempo starts to slow down at the end of the song, the drum beat and the bouncing bass line remain in lockstep and you also realize these guys have serious chops in addition to a finely honed sense of craft. And no surprise, since Shuteye Unison is comprised of veterans of several other Bay Area bands, including The Rum Diary, Built for the Sea, and The Action Design.

   

  If I was forced to pick a standout track from this album that is too consistently good to really have a standout, I'd say "Latin Metrics" is it. The bass line is, at times, just so damn melodic it hurts. I love it when a band can bring a bass line to the foreground and lodge it firmly in your head.  

   

  What makes this album even easier to like is that it's out on Parks and Records, a green record label based right here in the Bay Area. Last year they made donations to the National Parks Conservation Association, the National Forest Foundation, and Friends of the Urban Forest out of their proceeds. Local and green? I know what you're thinking and, no, it doesn't get any better than that. ...

  
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  untitled
  (Parks and Records; 2008)
  
  

  Anyone who has spent any time trying to be a "working" musician by writing, recording, and selling an album has been told this basic nugget of music biz wisdom by a number of industry insiders: If you want your album to get noticed, you gotta have your best material up front. You gotta immediately grab the record label intern's attention, or the reviewer's attention, or they aren't going to listen past the first 15 seconds.

   

  Of course, plenty of bands violate this conventional wisdom every day, and many of them still get plenty of attention. At this point, there's nothing revolutionary about, say, starting your album with a minute and 49 seconds of swelling ambient noise. That point notwithstanding, it still takes a certain amount of dedication to your particular artistic vision to buck the industry's prescriptions and just do your own thing. After all, many, many (dare I say the vast majority?) of musicians are mostly in it for the attention and the fame and money they're hoping will follow that attention, and are therefore only too happy to tailor their sound to whatever helps them "make it" in the music biz.

   

  So when I got Shuteye Unison's untitled debut EP in the mail and tossed it in my CD player, you could definitely say I was a little shocked when, somewhere around the 30 second mark, I realized these guys were taking their time, letting the ambient noise get good and swollen, before launching into the first song proper. By the 1:49 mark, I was duly impressed. Not because I was blown away by their novel sound or anything, but because this opening track says to me, "We are artists first and foremost." 

   

  The question now, of course, is: Did the rest of the album deliver on the art?

   

  Yes indeed, Shuteye Unison delivers. Of the six tracks in total, the opener is the only one composed entirely of ambient noise. The rest of the songs defintely have an atmoshperic quality, and there are several interludes that resort to the pure noise. But the songs are more properly described as a sort of indie psychedelic pop rock.

   

  After the minute and 49 seconds of ambience that opens the album, "Tomorrow's Five Horizons" seems to charge right out of the gate - though of course I mean that in relative terms. A driving bass lick starts it off, and I love how it just comes bubbling up out of the noise. Then the chiming, reverb-soaked guitars come in, and the somehow simultaneously soaring but whispery vocals take over. It all has a rather sublime feel. Even when it's at its most hard charging, there's a sense of detachment, an awareness of something larger than the exigencies of this song, like these aren't even songs at all but indie psych pop dispatches from some astral plane.

   

  

  The intro to "Fields Landing" brings the tempo back down to a crawl and imports some samples of a dude talking, too, a nice touch. It lends an experimental feel to this brief interlude before, once again, the reverb-drenched guitars come in, this time with a crunchiness that adds a satisfying heft to the song. As the tempo starts to slow down at the end of the song, the drum beat and the bouncing bass line remain in lockstep and you also realize these guys have serious chops in addition to a finely honed sense of craft. And no surprise, since Shuteye Unison is comprised of veterans of several other Bay Area bands, including The Rum Diary, Built for the Sea, and The Action Design.

   

  If I was forced to pick a standout track from this album that is too consistently good to really have a standout, I'd say "Latin Metrics" is it. The bass line is, at times, just so damn melodic it hurts. I love it when a band can bring a bass line to the foreground and lodge it firmly in your head.  

   

  What makes this album even easier to like is that it's out on Parks and Records, a green record label based right here in the Bay Area. Last year they made donations to the National Parks Conservation Association, the National Forest Foundation, and Friends of the Urban Forest out of their proceeds. Local and green? I know what you're thinking and, no, it doesn't get any better than that.
  
  [Mike G.]
  
  
  [STREAM] Shuteye Unison: Various tracks on MySpace
• Categories:Album review
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