Song(s) of the Day # 4,050 Unrest

 

Rock & Roll lore has any number of  seams of untold narrative to travel down. Rabbit holes. Pipelines. Whatever you will. Or else snakes taking you to the lake. From there take another snake to the foothills of a vast mountain range. To sunlit streams. Forest glades. Music is particularly fertile territory for the imaginitive potential of maps and legends A means of exploring other worlds. Galaxies.

 Check out Rock Dreams. Julian Cope's stuff. Any number of Rock related novels and films. It's always been the stuff of dreams and transportation. Fantasy. From the moment you start watching Top of the Pops, cross legged on  the family hearth. Listen to Yellow Submarine. Listen again and again with your mum to her Carpenters and Seekers records. Slack jawed and google eyed to the wonders of the universe.

Now decades down the line, there are any number of happy trails to follow and that's what I try to do on It Starts With a Birthstone. I've been kept active and engaged here on a daily basis I hope not repeated myself too painfully for twelve years now and don't worry that I'll dry up of inspiration any time soon.

Every time I pick up a music magazine I find some new source of inspiration. A point of departure. Ariadne's Thread. If that fails me I just need to go into a record ship and start flipping through the racks. Have a coversation with one of the guys behing the counter. Those guys are a font of knowledge  They set you off on another journey if duscovery 

I bough Perfect Teeth, the third and final album by American underground legends in Monday. From Beatbox. The record shop acriss the road from where I live. I've been playing it ever since. It's a sensational record..  4AD records. They're such gorgeous  artistic objects . You feel like stroking your cheek across its sleeve

 The rerelease is in honour of  Perfect Teeth's 30th Annuversay. Let's face it this was a record that was barely noticed at the time of its release though listening to it now it damned well should have been . It's 'a guitar in excelsis' record. Was recorded in Pachuderm Studio in Cannon Falls Minnesota days after Nirvana completed the sessions for In Utero in the same studio space.Just listening to the album set me off on a journey of discovery. That Rock & Roll for you. 

Unrest formed at Wakefield High School in Arlington Virginia, not far from Washington D.C.. They named themselves after a Henry Cow record, an early indication that they had no plans to drive down the main highway if life. Be stuck in the slow lane.

Unrest's sound on Perfect Teeth is the sound of rolling guitars and spaced out vocals. My Bloody Valentine. Meet Lush. Meet Pale Saunts at Wakefield High School in Arlington Virginia, not far from Washington D.C. And have a picnic And plan a seance. And then a revolution. Lovely stuff. Harmonious. Solendid. 

Perfect Teeth has an arresting sleeve with a wonderful picture of Cult Mancunian journalist Cath Carroll. Shot by Cult photographer Ribert Mapplethorpe. The subject of Patti Smith's memoirs Just Kids whuch focuses on their formative love affair in the early Seventies. Mapplethorpe was famously gay inclined but his relationship with Patti was certainly a love affair. Patti had any number of fundamental love affairs across the course if her life which informed her work and sensibility. With Mapplethorpe. With Sam Shepherd. Jim Carroll. Tim Verlaine. Alain Lanier. Fred Sonic Smith

Someone once saw Unrest play at the Duchess of York in Leeds and they played for so long that the cleaners started sweeping the place up during the encore. This is a nice way to remember a band that were barely noticed at the time. But should have been.