One of the cooler things about the Great Halcyon Days of College Radio (say, 1987-93) was the number of different camps populating the underground. You had your hardcore kids, punks, and skate rats big on yelling and beer, skeptical of synths and Englishmen. You had your goths and art school kids, big on keyboards and eyeliner. And you had your tweedy collegiate types, the ones with their hands on the radio transmitters, and who made (sm)arty-pants indie-rock their reigning sound. It was that audience that took Unrest up as a flagship, making them loom as large as Pavement, Hal Hartley, and David Foster Wallace in the mid-90s college-sophomore canon. Super-minimalist pop, cloudy atmosphere, trans-Atlantic cool, and obscure obsessions like Cath Carroll and Isabel Bishop: Nothing seemed to fit quite as well with design courses and corduroy.
Design types, after all, have that thing about minimalism, and this band's stark, elegant sound could strip things down to a strikingly small number of moving parts-- some kind of warm, detailed dream of the indie-rock group as postmodern 50s pop combo. This reissue of 1992's Imperial f.f.r.r. demonstrates where Unrest, formerly a scattershot pseudo-punk outfit, became that version of itself-- an art-pop guitar band drawing incredibly simple lines. If the story of this group is that of frontman Mark Robinson gradually admitting he might rather be an English kid from the early 80s, well, their EP of Factory Records covers may be the coming-out party, but this is where it counts.
The first attraction is the sound of their big ecstatic pop songs, which feel as crisp and joyous as ever: "Suki" rushes along on clean guitar jangle and Robinson's coy babble (no one's ever sounded so good just repeating the word "kicking"), and "Cherry Cream On", an even coyer come-on, is still the record's standout blast. Come to this reissue looking for that pop rush, though, and you'll barely get an EP's worth of what you want-- even counting the eight bonus tracks. Because no matter how easy it is to remember Unrest as a racing pop act ("Cath Carroll", "Make Out Club"), the fact is that they were starker and artier than that, and the scattershot experiments of their early releases can still be heard fading into this one. The first track is just the test tone used for mastering, and around its edges you get just as many art pieces: Here a collage of beats, bells, and bass; there a pattern of feedback bouncing between speakers.
But those are the poles: The actual core of this album is stark, warm, and elegantly simple, and it's in that space that Unrest wound up doing their most interesting work. The title track, for instance, is just a slow, chiming guitar run and one of Robinson's awkward choir-boy vocals; a 14-minute variant among the bonus tracks strips it down even further. The album version of "Isabel" is similar, just acoustic guitar and a careful chorus harmony; it was the 12" version, included here, that fleshed it out into a college radio hit, sounding something like indie-pop trip-hop. "June", one of the band's best-ever tracks, glides smoothly along on just bass, drums, and bassist Bridget Cross's vocals, then fleshes it out into a harmonized wash that's a blueprint for the post-Unrest Air Miami project.
There are plenty of skips around that sound-- they're something like Crispy Ambulance fans on "Loyola", something like Krautrock devotees on the bonus "Hydrofoil One". But on a track like "I Do Believe You Are Blushing", it sounds absolutely pure: They seem to have whittled down American indie-rock into some variant that feels as lush and dreamy as English post-rock, and you start to see how a guitar-based three-piece from DC could share fans with acts like Stereolab, share UK label-space with the Cocteau Twins, and cover both new wave obscurities like the Family Fodder and indie pop prototypes like Miaow.
The trick is to see Unrest for what they were: A pop band that didn't often play pop songs. There's always that rushing, radio-friendly jangle, yes. But the bulk of their work-- both here and on the even more accessible Perfect Teeth-- was a lot more stylized than that, and the oddly dreamy pop sound they sketched out tends to be unique enough to inspire devotion. Imperial's littered with tracks you'll wind up skipping; even with those eight bonuses (more prototypes and variants than anything else), I can only whittle it down to a nine-song Perfect Album. But when it's worth it, it kills: This stuff is pure style, and unlike just about anything around it.
