Alden Penner and Nicholas Thorburn met in 1998 in Campbell River, BC. Penner was a 10th grader and Thornburn was a senior in high school. Six years later, their new release, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone? has brought them some favorable attention.
Penner and Thornburn started the Unicorns after breaking with their previous band, The Stanley Milgrim Project. They only had two songs and they showed up with a small boom box, “a DIO tape, two sets of barbells, an eight-millimeter film projector with an old reel of animated films and the makings for 10 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.” After taking their name from an icon on the back of a sex pamphlet, the band was complete.
The Unicorns have hardly lost their penchant for props, using everything on their latest recording from an electric trumpet to a Speak-and-Math.
“I Don’t Wanna Die” starts off the CD with a swinging ballad about death and the many ways in which The Unicorns would not like to die. Penner and Thornburn have a strange synchronicity as singers. Neither is credited as the lead, and many of the songs not only feature harmonies but back and forth banter between the two. When one sings, “I predict that I’ll die in a plane crash,” the other is there with the sound effect — “pssh pow!”
On “I Was Born a Unicorn” Penner and Thornburn go back and forth arguing with lines like, “I think I’m doing it wrong” followed by an emphatic “You are doing it wrong!”
Death is everywhere on Who Will Cut Our Hair. The full line is, “I was born a unicorn / I coulda sworn you believed in me / Then how come all the other unicorns are dead?” But the weird thing is how happy it seems. The Unicorns maintain such a manic, upbeat sound with such strange material underneath it that it can’t help but engage the listener at least as much as it perplexes them.
Penner and Thorburn’s ear for sound is amazing, and the sound is what ultimately sustains the album. “Ghost Mountain” is full of countermelodies and complicated harmonies, but the production tricks are hard to pin down. Above a deceptively simple synth a bare-boned guitar comes in with a chime. The sound is so full and expansive that it’s hard to believe that there’s so little there.
“Sea Ghost” is the most catchy and instantly identifiable track on the album. The lyrics are so childishly simple but they often border on absolute genius. Over an irresistible, twangy guitar line, they sing, “I drove into that freezing sea / with a parasite attached to me / I hoped the salt below would divorce what was right above / but league after league / it yet remained / for the fleshy vessel I / kept it sustained.”
“Jellybones,” about a cancer patient of the same name, sounds a great deal like fellow two-piece Mates of State, with a thumping, danceable organ set to a quick drumbeat. Then it takes on a far more solemn air with the lines, “This is love / so we’ll survive” set to acoustic guitar before fading out to the sounds of a respirator.
“Let’s Get Known” begins by bouncing two spoken radio monologues to stereo. In your right ear, there’s talk about how “there’s the people who are heavily into the satanic aspects of it;” in your left is a ticket announcement. Then a singer comes in saying “Hey let’s get known,” managing to adequately sum up in 20 seconds the simple motives of a band that’s trying to get famous — not money, not Satan or scandal, but “matching clothes for [the] live show” and “getting [their] work shown.”
They ruminate metaphorically, “look at the ants on the floor / they work real hard / lifting three times their mass / and sometimes more.” Then the track ends at just less than two minutes.
If there’s anything to say about Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone, it’s that there isn’t nearly enough. The Unicorns manage to fit so much material into such a tiny space that it’s hard to let go after 41 minutes. At the same time, the band always knows exactly where to stop before they’ve worn out their welcome, and you never feel like you’re hearing the same thing twice.
In today’s music environment, innovative pop is nearly impossible to come by. Somehow, The Unicorns manage to blow current conventions out of the water — they sing about death without being sad, manage to be sincere without ever seeming cloying, and are novel without a gimmick. Somehow the band manages to be at least as rare a thing as the animal they’ve chosen as their namesake.
