Plumbiferous Media

The newest of what is now three albums from Untied States, Instant Every­thing, Con­stant Noth­ing seems to be going for the full inter­na­tional approach, per­haps in con­trast to the band’s name, a more region­ally focused play on words. To be more spe­cific, Atlanta based Untied States released Every­thing a few months back in the UK only. It is now (this com­ing Tues­day) releas­ing the album in Europe and the US, under the French label Dis­tile. But logis­tics aside, Instant Every­thing, Con­stant Noth­ing is very good, if often some­what strange. Clearly exper­i­men­tal, but done by a band that could eas­ily have played straight rock had they so desired, Every­thing is a truly inter­est­ing album.

While Untied States makes a habit of includ­ing gen­er­ally flaw­less intro­duc­tions to many of their tracks, the band leaves plenty of time for tracks’ main bod­ies. Tracks’ com­po­si­tions usu­ally fall some­where between one of two extremes. On one end are tracks like “Not Fences, Mere Masks,” which is made up of mul­ti­ple small sec­tions, each of which stands out on its own, that are then strung together with no tran­si­tions what­so­ever. While as a result, the track as a whole has lit­tle to no direc­tion, or at least gives the lis­tener no sense of direc­tion, the indi­vid­ual sec­tions are among the best on the album. They are always engag­ing, dense, but by no means over­crowded, unique, and never played for too long. On the other end of the track spec­trum are those that fall to a some­what more con­ven­tional approach of larger, more con­nected sec­tions. In gen­eral, these tracks aren’t quite as well played, but they have the dis­tinct advan­tage hav­ing a nav­i­gat­ing light, if pale and distant.

On Instant Every­thing, Con­stant Noth­ing, lead singer Colin Arn­stein cre­ates a very dis­tinct vocal pres­ence - quite fit­ting for such an exper­i­men­tal album. Begin­ning with the choral echo of “Unsil­vered Mir­rors,” Arn­stein mod­u­lates his voice in a vari­ety of ways from singing with Thom Yorke-esque into­na­tion to the much harsher vocal edge of tracks like “Delu­sions Are Grander,” to every point in between. Arnstein’s voice, even through the most chaotic parts of Every­thing, is fit skill­fully to the music. The only prob­lem with the vocals then, are that they often get engulfed by the rest of the music, even when the music could most use their direction.

The lyrics of Every­thing aren’t always easy to under­stand. This is, how­ever, not espe­cially prob­lem­atic given Untied States’ dense sound. Rather, they con­tribute more to the music as sound than as lyri­cal con­tent, though a few (gen­uinely inter­est­ing) lines do poke through. In gen­eral though, the prime func­tion of the lyrics seems to be to allow Arn­stein to actu­ally sing some­thing, rather than, say, moan for the entire length of the album.

Untied States attempts to exper­i­ment in as many ways as pos­si­ble with Every­thing, with quite solid results. The com­bi­na­tion of Colin Arnstein’s dis­tinc­tive tones and the energy of Untied States’ musi­cal ele­ments cre­ates a high level of lay­er­ing which courses through the album, demon­strat­ing Untied States’ skill at craft­ing even the most abstract of sound. It’s not per­fect - occa­sional mis­steps and a gen­eral lack of dis­cernible direc­tion detract some­what from the over­all qual­ity of Instant Every­thing, Con­stant Noth­ing, but for the most part, cre­ativ­ity tri­umphs over these flaws.

“Not Faces, Mere Masks” from Instant Every­thing, Con­stant Noth­ing

This post is tagged 70-79, Untied States