Earworms: The Unicorns

Pop music simultaneously has a bad rep and gets off too easy. It’s seen by many as vapid and simple, consumed and produced by mindless zombies; but at the same time, we’ll forgive anything for a good hook. Because of this we let our pop stars misbehave, and let their music bore us. Meanwhile, music’s critical apparatus sees itself as above pop, or, when it does deign to review it, fails to engage with it. We are left with a critical establishment, and a culture more generally, that sees pop as something to accept or reject wholesale, rather than something worthy of critical thought. 

Recently, however, we’ve seen a surge of cultural criticism that takes pop seriously – and we’ve seen pop that deserves to be taken seriously, from Lemonade to Dua Lipa and Charli XCX and much, much more. (While the ice around pop culture began to thaw with the Frankfurt school, that trickle has transformed into an ocean in recent memory.) This influx of criticism suggests a blossoming awareness of the importance of pop. To that end, this is Earworms, where we think about pop in all its glory and, in this case, weirdness.

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The Unicorns released their second album, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone, during a strange time in indie rock. This was when Arcade Fire, The Decemberists, and the leaders of the Montreal scene (also home to The Unicorns) Godspeed You! Black Emperor, were taking over indie with their self-serious, capital-I Important albums. The Unicorns, equally as ambitious, went in precisely the other direction, crafting catchy, silly songs that belie their innovative structure. 

Who Will Cut Our Hair follows a loose concept about the transition out of childhood that follows the acceptance of one’s inevitable death. The band use childlike themes (telling ghost stories around a campfire, contracting a case of the “jellybones”) to tell deceptively adult stories about the loss that accompanies the end of innocence. The album is book-ended by the outline of their story: “I Don’t Wanna Die” and “Ready to Die.” Their juxtaposition suggests the realization that an acceptance of death is the groundwork of really living – as Wilco put it, “You have to learn how to die/If you want to be alive.” 

But a tight concept album this is not; the real story is their ambitious pop song-craft. They shatter any notion of traditional verse-chorus-verse pop. Take “Jellybones,” where they take a chorus catchy enough to sustain most bands for an entire song and immediately change directions from a puerile tale of nervousness around a crush to a wide-eyed admonition of the power of love. They apply this managed chaos to half-jokingly poking fun at making it big (“If we work real hard, we can buy matching clothes/for our live shows”), Magnolia-style washed-up child stars (FAN: “I hate you”/STAR: “I hate you too”), and the all-important difference between horses and unicorns (who happen to be people too).

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Their songs are wonderfully frayed around the edges, like in their frequent instrumental freak-outs at the beginning of songs, as if each band member felt the need to take turns making sure their instruments still work. But they can also show real virtuosity (not to mention versatility) when the interplay of drums, guitars and synths align; but it is never too long before entropy sets in again. 

Centering the revelry is the by-turns productive and explosive tension between the two singers, Nick Diamonds and Alden Ginger. In their clashing sensibilities we find something like the locus of the band, where their push and pull – a balancing of noise and pop – results in the brilliant restlessness of their songs. They are neither in sync nor opposites which complete each other: too close and too far. Their relationship was also prone to devolving, as on “I Was Born (A Unicorn),” into petty squabbles. Perhaps they, too, were growing up on the album. Following a hectic tour promoting the album, the band quietly broke up. Nonetheless, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone stands testament to a delicate process, and the great pop they made along the way.

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